the exotic in nineteenth-century french opera, part 1

The Exotic in Nineteenth-Century French

Opera, Part 1: Locales and Peoples

RALPH P. LOCKE

EXPLORING AN EXTENSIVE REPERTOIRE:WHICH WORKS?

When we hear references to “the exotic” innineteenth-century French opera, we probablythink of a small number of works, all largely orentirely serious and all from the second half of

the century: Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine, Bizet’sLes Pêcheurs de perles, Saint-Saëns’s Samson etDalila, Delibes’s Lakmé, Massenet’s Thaïs,and—most widely known of them all today—Bizet’sCarmen. Such works explore and exploit,in imaginative ways, long-accepted and often-stereotypical images of peoples that Europeans(and, more generally, Westerners) thought of

The present article (in two parts) is based on principles thatI developed and explored in two books: Musical Exoticism:Images and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2009) and Music and the Exotic from the Renaissanceto Mozart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).It offers my first extensive and systematic attempt at explor-ing the works of a single relatively coherent “national” oper-atic tradition. I here apply principles and methods laid out inthose two books (e.g., Table 3.1 inMusical Exoticism). A con-densed version of the article forms the core of two chaptersthat I wrote (numbered 17.3 and 17.4) in Histoire de l’opérafrançais, ed. Hervé Lacombe, 3 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 2020− ),II, 949–63. The chapters were skillfully translated by DennisCollins. They are there entitled: “Les Territoires de l’exo-tisme” and “Les Formes de l’exotisme: intrigues, personnages,styles musicaux.”My original text appears here—revised andexpanded—with permission of Fayard. My third chapter in

Lacombe’s book (17.5: “Exotisme et Colonialisme,” II, 963–68)largely derives from chapter 8 of my Musical Exoticism(especially pp. 175–202) and is therefore not incorporatedinto the present article. In 2021 Lacombe’s volume 2 washonored with two prizes: the Prix René Dumesnil (by theAcadémie des Beaux-Arts) and the Grand Prix FranceMusique-Claude Samuel (by the French radio system).

A number of scholars generously commented upon thetext in draft or offered other helpful advice, includingJonathan Bellman, Jacek Blaszkiewicz, Peter Bloom,Gunther Braam, Carlo Caballero, Diana Hallman, KarenHenson, Nizam Kettaneh, the late Katherine Kolb, HervéLacombe, Hugh Macdonald, James Parakilas, JulianRushton, Tommaso Sabbatini, Richard Sherr, HelenaKopchick Spencer, and Jürgen Thym.

19th Century Music, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 93–118. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN: 1533-8606 © 2021 by The Regents of theUniversity of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce articlecontent through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2021.45.2.93.

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as being Them: an Other, different from Us byessence.

Those operas, though, are a small sample andnot necessarily representative. Exotic settings—and, more generally, exoticist attitudes aboutOther peoples—were manifest in hundreds ofnineteenth-century French operatic works.1

The works range from four- and five-act grandsopéras—entirely sung, and relying on recitativeor arioso interchanges to set up the next mainmusical number—to daffily comic works thatrequire modest (though often extremely adept)performing forces and that feature extendedspoken scenes between the numbers. A typicalinstance of the exotic in grand opéra is Eboli’sflamenco-style “Veil Song” in Verdi’s DonCarlos (1867), act II; the song recounts a secre-tive love tryst in the Alhambra palace inGranada and involves a Moorish (that is, Arab)king named Ahmet and a veiled woman. (Thisstory-song also prefigures a crucial event laterin the opera, involving Eboli herself.) A typicalinstance of exoticism in a light, comical work—with much spoken dialogue—is Offenbach’sBa-Ta-Clan (1855). This slippery one-acter isset in a disconcertingly unreal version of China

filled with conspirators who turn out to be notChinese but French.

Many French operas were performed fre-quently at the time yet eventually fell out ofthe repertory. One or another, like Ba-Ta-Clan,may be revived occasionally, under special cir-cumstances.2 The present article seeks toredress the balance a bit by discussing not justthe better-known “exotic” operas (includingthose mentioned above) but also such gratifyingworks as Bizet’s Djamileh, Saint-Saëns’s LaPrincesse jaune, Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore,and Chabrier’s L’Étoile, plus meritorious instan-ces by other skillful composers, including LuigiCherubini, D. F. E. Auber, Adolphe Adam,Félicien David, Ambroise Thomas, and AndréMessager. Some of these works were widelyloved in France and elsewhere but are now littleknown because their extensive use of spokendialogue does not suit the needs of modern operahouses. (The latter tend to be too large for speechto carry well; also, they have become dependenton international assemblages of singers, many ofwhomwould be ill at ease speaking quick, wittydialogue, whether in French or in the local lan-guage.)3 Examining these lesser-known worksreveals merits that have gone relatively unher-alded; as for the better-known works, approach-ing them, too, in this wide-angled way helps usto a richer appreciation of their strengths andtheir often-enlivening internal contradictions.

As we examine these French-language works,it is important to keep in mind that, in theFrancophone operatic world, numerous Italianand German works were performed in Frenchand that some of these likewise featuredstrongly exotic elements.4 For example, Il trova-tore (Le trouvère in Francophone opera houses)involves a Gypsywoman (Azucena) and a chorusof Gypsy women and men (highly fictive ver-sions of the ethnic group today called the Roma

1The repertory of French operatic works that deal with someaspect of the exotic is vast and depends on how one defines“exotic.” (See the first section, “Terminology,” in theAppendix below.) Two previous attempts at an overview areTom Cooper, “‘Frenchmen in Disguise’: French MusicalExoticism and Empire in the Nineteenth Century,” inEmpire and Culture: The French Experience, 1830–1940,ed. Martin Evans (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004),113–27; and two books (not focused solely on France, and deal-ingmainly with orchestral music though also somewhat withopera) by Jonathan David Little: The Influence of EuropeanLiterary and Artistic Representations of the “Orient” onWestern Orchestral Compositions, c. 1840–1920: FromOriental Inspiration to “Exotic” Orchestration (Lewiston,NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010) and Literary Sources ofNineteenth-Century Musical Orientalism: The HypnoticSpell of the Exotic on Music of the Romantic Period(Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2011), esp. Appendix(pp. 221–58). A collection on the French fascination withthe music of other lands and peoples during the nineteenthcentury (often in genres other than opera, such as publishedtranscriptions of folk songs) is Fascinantes Étrangetés: LaDécouverte de l’altérité musicale en Europe au XIXe siècle:Actes du colloque de la Côte-Saint-André 24-27 août 2011,ed. Luc Charles-Dominique, Yves Defrance, and DanièlePistone (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014). Most chapters deal withgenres other than opera (e.g., published transcriptions of folksongs) and focus on European lands (e.g., Greece, Corsica,Spain). But some chapters treat more distant geographicregions (e.g., dancers from India that visited Paris).

2See the Appendix, sections 3 and 4. A recording of Ba-Ta-Clanwas released in theUnited States on the 1967 LP entitledOf Castles and Cathedrals: A Concert for Two Emperors atthe Palace of Compiègne (Musical Heritage Society MHS794; conductor, Marcel Couraud). It contains a witty new nar-ration linking the numbers.3See, again, the Appendix, sections 3 and 4.4On the complex question of terminology, e.g., “exotic” vs.“exoticist,” see the Appendix, section 1.

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or Romanies).5 Similarly, Aïda (to use its Frenchspelling) features two ancient peoples—Egyptians and dark-skinned “Ethiopians” (theinhabitants of today’s Sudan)—each of whichwas understood as being very different from“Us” Europeans.6 Such operas will be discussedvery briefly here, but they nonetheless form animportant part of the context within whichParis-based composers wrote exotically chargedoperas specifically for one or another French the-ater: for example, Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine andVerdi’s Don Carlos. And this was true regardlessof whether a composer was French born, likeBerlioz and Massenet, or foreign born, like thetwo composers just named,Meyerbeer and Verdi.

We should also remember that Frenchoperas—including ones that are notably exotic—wereperformed in certain Francophone locales outsideof France, e.g., Belgium, Switzerland, colonialAlgiers, and New Orleans.7 Many of them wereperformed elsewhere in translation, e.g., inGerman (in German and Austrian theaters) or inItalian (in Italy but also in English-, Spanish-,and Portuguese-speaking lands). So French exoticoperas can also tell us something about culturalvalues in places to which such works were suc-cessfully exported.

WHAT GUIDING PRINCIPLES?

French-language exotic operas conveyed ethno-cultural Otherness in a wide variety of ways.

Yet descriptions of such works, whether innewspaper and magazine reviews at the time orin recent scholarship and criticism, have oftenfocused on a single question: Towhat degree doesa given work use musical materials typical—orthought to be typical—of the people or ethnicgroup being shown on stage? That question isimportant and deserves to be explored even morethan it has been in previous scholarly writings.8

The present article addresses it briefly, butas one aspect of a broader question: In whatdiverse ways did the music (whether exotic-sounding or not), the sung words, and—tothe extent that we can know this—the stagingand other performance-specific aspects of a givenwork (e.g., gesture, dance, costumes, makeup)reflect conceptions of lands and peoples thatwere widely deemed exotic in France and indeedelsewhere in the Western world?

By framing the matter broadly, we allow our-selves to pay attention to musical, verbal, andvisual features that were considered markers ofethno-cultural Otherness and to attitudes (ster-eotypes, prejudices) that prompted the use ofsuch features. These various features (markers)and the attitudes behind them are all recog-nized in what I call the “All the Music in FullContext” Paradigm of musical exoticism incontradistinction to the long-prevailing “ExoticStyle Only” Paradigm.9 Some of these markers

5Ralph P. Locke,Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 150–60.6In two articles I explore the implications of exoticistconceptions in Aida: “Beyond the Exotic: How ‘Eastern’ IsAida?” Cambridge Opera Journal 17:2 (2005): 105–39,reprinted in shortened and lightly revised form in Art andIdeology in European Opera: Essays in Honour of JulianRushton, ed. Rachel Cowgill, David Cooper, and CliveBrown (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), 264–80; and “Aida andNine Readings of Empire,” Nineteenth-Century MusicReview 3:1 (2006): 45–72, reprinted in shortened and lightlyrevised form in Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvinand Hilary Poriss (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2010), 152–75.7See, for example, Charlotte Bentley, “The Race for Robertand Other Rivalries: Negotiating the Local and (Inter)national in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans,” CambridgeOpera Journal 29 (2017): 94–112; and Jann Pasler, “L’Opéradans l’empire colonial français,” in Histoire de l’opérafrançais, ed. Hervé Lacombe, 3 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 2020– )II, 802–11.

8A few recent studies that touch (in part) on this questioninclude Michael V. Pisani, Imagining Native America inMusic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), a bookthat includes a few French and French-influenced instances;Hervé Lacombe and Christine Rodriguez, La Habanera deCarmen: Naissance d’un tube (Paris: Fayard, 2014); RalphP. Locke, “Spanish Local Color in Bizet’s Carmen:Unexplored Borrowings and Transformations,” in Music,Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830–1914, ed.Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2009), 316–60; and Richard E. Mueller,Beauty and Innovation in la machine chinoise: Falla,Debussy, Ravel, Roussel (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press,2018). See also n. 1.9I define and discuss this broader paradigm (which embracesbut also goes far beyond the narrower and more familiar“Exotic Style” Paradigm) in two books: Musical Exoticism,1–12, 48–65, and (a “prequel”) Music and the Exotic fromthe Renaissance to Mozart, 17–27. I first articulated the nar-row and broad Paradigms in Ralph P. Locke, “ABroader Viewof Musical Exoticism,” Journal of Musicology 24, no. 4(2007): 477–521. See also the opening section of my“Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers, Muezzins and TimelessSands: Musical Images of the Middle East,” this journal 22(1998): 20–53; a somewhat shorter version (but with fuller

RALPH P.LOCKEExotic inFrench Opera

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may have reflected, at least semi-accurately,musical or other cultural features of the nationalor ethnic group that was being represented onstage. Some reflected those features but in ahighly simplified, exaggerated, or distorted way.And some were invented out of whole cloth.Yet all of them could serve to characterize a spe-cific Other people through one or more featuresthat were understood as “odd”—different fromEuropean norms—and that were thought to beappropriate to the character or behavior of thepeople in question according to some mixtureof factual information, personal impressions,and often-noxious stereotypes. Most impor-tantly, taking non-musical markers into consid-eration, along with the attitudes behind them,frees us to consider the exoticist effect of passa-ges of music that were not themselves markedas exotic (hence the “All the Music” formula-tion). Some of the styles and proceduresemployed in these operas were not specificallyassociated with exotic realms; rather, they wereutterly usual in operas of the day. Still, thismeant that they were available, in the contextof an exotic opera, to help convey plot and char-acterization and thereby to reinforce stereotypesabout and prejudicial attitudes toward the landand people in question. This seemingly paradox-ical situation—non-exotic music serving anexotic portrayal or “representation”—results inwhat is perhaps the single most untilled fieldfor exploration of the several that the “All theMusic in Full Context” Paradigm opens up. Iwill explore nine such instances of “non-exoticexotic portrayal” (to put it paradoxically) towardthe end of Part 2 of this article.

In recent decades, stage directors and designersinvolved in a new production of an opera haveoften introduced bold new elements that thelibrettist and composer never could have imag-ined. The aim of the production team, whetherexplicitly stated or not, is often to play downthe prejudicial stereotypes invoked in the work.Or a team’s aim can be to intensify a stereotypein order to put it under critical scrutiny. Certainof these updated, re-located, or reimagined

productions have been hailed by audience mem-bers and critics, or derided, or both. The presentarticle in no way attempts to deny or excuse thederogatory stereotypes in the works that it exa-mines. Rather, it aims to uncover some of theresonances that such stereotypes had for a work’screators and for its audiences (early on but also, insome cases, for decades or even a century ormorethereafter).10

The bulk of the present article (Part 1 of two)consists of a survey of the main geo-culturalregions beyond France that were represented onstage in nineteenth-century French operas. Part 2(to be published in a subsequent issue in this jour-nal) will examine typical plots and characters andwill conclude by discussing musical styles andprocedures, ending with the aforementioned dis-cussion of non-exotic-sounding musical meansin exotic operas. Throughout Parts 1 and 2, atten-tion will be given—however briefly—to the rela-tionship between the French operatic world andimperialism, including France’s own massivenineteenth-century colonial ventures in theCaribbean, North and West Africa, andSoutheast Asia. Also, I will frequently draw atten-tion not just to largely serious works but also tonotably imaginative works that are heavily comicin nature and use spoken dialogue. These areworks that, as Hervé Lacombe notes, have untilrecent decades been almost systematicallyexcluded fromdiscussions of exoticism in opera.11

VARIOUSLY EXOTIC PEOPLES AND PLACES

As in previous centuries in Italy and elsewhere,the opera industry in nineteenth-century France

notes) appeared in The Exotic inWesternMusic, ed. JonathanBellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 104–36, 326–33.

10The scope of the present article, already quite wide, mustset to the side such questions as how stage productionstoday handle or might profitably handle—re-enact, resist,replace, etc.—such stereotypes, and what aesthetic and eth-ical considerations such practical decisions entail. I brieflydiscuss performance choices (including interventionist stag-ings) in Musical Exoticism, 312–27, and in Music and theExotic, 11–16 and 322–23. For an overview of traditions,and recent practices, in operatic staging, see David J. Levin,“Issues and Trends in Contemporary Opera Production,”in The Grove Book of Operas, 2nd edn., ed. Stanley Sadie,rev. Laura Macy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006),xi–xxiii.11Hervé Lacombe, “The Writing of Exoticism in the Librettiof the Opéra-Comique, 1825–1862,” trans. Peter Glidden,Cambridge Opera Journal 11:2 (1999): 135–58 (here 135).

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often preferred stories that took place in a dis-tant land or in the distant or legendary past.Or indeed both: Chabrier’s L’Étoile, for example,presents the audience with a storybook MiddleEastern land redolent of the Thousand and OneNights. Distance in space and/or time helpedmake a plot believable, precisely because thespecific events and details of daily life in thoselands and eras were not well known to mostoperagoers. This somewhat ironic consider-ation became ever more important in thecourse of the nineteenth century, as the aesthe-tics of realism, with its heavy focus on thefamiliar and the here-and-now, gradually re-placed Enlightenment- and Romantic-era norms.

Setting a French opera in a time and place farfrom current-day Paris (or Lyons, or Brussels)also helped deflect objections that governmentor religious officials might have raised aboutany social, political, or religious critique thatthey sniffed out in the libretto. For example, ifthe opera’s creators wished to condemn theCatholic church’s intolerance of other religions,they could make the message more acceptableby placing the plot two centuries earlier than thecurrent day (as in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots)or, indeed, four centuries earlier and in a foreignland (Germany, near the border of Switzerland,in Halévy’s La Juive).

In the remainder of the present Part, I drawattention to a number of regions that were argu-ably viewed as exotic and thatwere actively repre-sented—some more frequently than others—innineteenth-century French operas. We startwith certain European lands and peoples thatin France were regarded as exotic to somedegree. We then move to the Americas, Africa,and East Asia, and finally reach the exoticregion (or we might say super-region) that wasmost extensively exploited: the vast “MiddleEast,” understood as extending from NorthAfrica, Turkey, and the Arabian Peninsula toPersia, India, and Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka).The “Middle East” will thus be treated in a longsection of its own, with various sub-sections.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Francewas recurringly involved in colonizing andgaining (or, in the Caribbean, regaining) controlover extensive regions overseas. In 1802–03,Napoleon’s troops reversed the Revolution’s 1794abolition of slavery on Guadeloupe, Martinique,

and other French-owned islands and came closeto reconquering Saint-Domingue (today’s Haïti),which had asserted its independence in 1791.France conqueredAlgiers in 1830 and, in the ensu-ing decades, expanded control over Algeria andneighboring Tunisia and Morocco. Cochinchina,a major section of what is now called Vietnam,came under French rule in 1862.12

Despite all these historical realities, I willmostly not be drawing direct connections toFrench imperialism and colonialism, in partbecause the theatrical works in question largelyavoided doing so themselves.13 Nonetheless,the French efforts at colonizing distant landsclearly helped stoke an interest in distant anddifferent cultures. This is particularly evidentin the case of the Middle East: throughout theNapoleonic period, Egypt and greater Syria(including Palestine) were amajor, recurring the-ater of obsession for the French military, andalso for significant French Egyptologists such asChampollion. Several decades later, Algeria—aterritory even closer to home—became a majorpermanent colony, complete with resort hotelsand an opera house of its own. But we begin withlands that were within Europe itself or even bor-dered on France.14

12France (like Britain) often controlled its overseas territo-ries by means of what scholars now call “informal imperial-ism,” e.g., through the establishment of treaty ports and byworkingwith, rather than sidelining, local officials.Much ofthis was done in what the French took to be a progressive,modernizing spirit: they claimed, at least, that they wereseeking to bring science and learning to a less-developedland and to guide its inhabitants into participating prof-itably in the worldwide economy. See Alice L. Conklin, AMission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire inFrance and West Africa 1895–1930 (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1997); and David Todd, A Velvet Empire:French Informal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).13I discuss the impact of imperialism and colonialism onnineteenth-century opera (generally, including in Lakmé)in my Musical Exoticism, 175–213.14I will not be discussing the possibility that regions withinFrance were viewed through an exotic lens. This is of coursequite plausible, even likely (e.g., Gounod’s Mireille andLalo’s Le Roi d’Ys). But attitudes toward such regions werealso colored by various stereotypes relating to social class,(lack of) education, and religiosity: e.g., the archetypallyignorant or deeply pious peasant from les provinces.Regarding Mireille and other operas set in the French pro-vinces, see Katharine Ellis, “Mireille’s Homecoming?Gounod, Mistral, and the Midi,” Journal of the AmericanMusicological Society 65 (2012): 463–509; and her bookFrench Musical Life: Regional Perspectives from the July


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NORTHERN LANDS

Relatively few French operas, at any point inthe century, were set in Scandinavia, theNetherlands, or Eastern Europe.15 By contrast,Great Britain (especially England and Scotland)and German-speaking locales had a near-constant presence on the French operaticstage. Epic tales of ancient Scottish warriorswere much in vogue early in the century,thanks to the wildly popular texts publishedin the 1760s by James Macpherson, whoclaimed that they were written by an ancientScottish poet named Ossian: a kind of cold-climate Homer. Lesueur’sOssian, ou Les Bardes(1804) was given a particularly lavish stagingat the Opéra that drew much attention, butthe work did not remain long in the reper-tory.16 Méhul’s one-act Uthal (Opéra-Comique, 1806), likewise based on the Ossianpoems, emphasized, in highly effective music,the noble spirit that Macpherson’s texts hadattributed to the ancient Scottish bardsand warriors. Uthal was even less successfulat the box office than Ossian, but—as recentwritings and a recording reveal—it weaves aspecial, imaginative mood of dignified, “north-ern” solemnity, reinforced by frequent use ofthe harp (associated, however inaccurately,with the singing of traditional epics) and by

Méhul’s decision to have no violins in theorchestra.17

England and the German-speaking lands wereoften treated as quasi-neutral locales, whereany kind of political or romantic plot couldunfurl.18 Still, numerous comic operas portrayedEnglish lords and ladies as superficial or irasci-ble, e.g., Lady Pamela and her husband, LordCokbourg, in Auber’s Fra Diavolo (Opéra-Comique, 1830).19 A German locale could addto the pleasure by invoking local customs thatParisians had read about. In Gounod’s Faust(Théâtre-Lyrique, 1859; revised: Opéra, 1869),the end of act II—on the fairgrounds by the towngates—is a waltz scene involving the chorus.Waltzing, though very much part of Parisiansocial life by the 1850s, was well known ashaving originated in German-speaking lands.20

The waltz music here offers a particularly“village-like” emphasis on the downbeat notesin the bass and, as a whole, forms an ironicallycheerful backdrop against which Faust hashis first encounter with—and is immediatelyrebuffed by—the modest peasant lass Marguerite(Goethe’s Gretchen).

Saint-Saëns’s comic opera Le Timbre d’argent(TheSilverBell; 1877,Théâtre-Lyrique [Nouveau];rev., Brussels, 1914) is set mainly in eighteenth-century Vienna, and the painter who is its hero(or anti-hero) is named Conrad. The work has atouristic feel: various scenes occur in the pain-ter’s humble workshop-apartment and inVienna’s main opera house, including a sceneplayed out on the theater’s stage, viewed as iffrom the rear of the stage, looking towardwherethe Viennnese audience is seen sitting! Other

Monarchy to the 1930s (NewYork: Oxford University Press,forthcoming), especially chapters 7 and 10. Stereotypes relat-ing to social class (aristocratic pretentiousness and bully-ing, working-class slyness or dullness, etc.) are rampant inthe French comic-opera repertory, as in Messager’sLes P’tites Michu (1897). See my review of Messager,Nineteenth-Century Music Review 18, no. 2 (2021): 327–34and 355 (a correction).15There are some prominent exceptions, of course. Fourthat are set in the Netherlands or Scandinavia are Auber’sGustave III (Opéra, 1833), Offenbach’s Geneviève deBrabant (Bouffes-Parisiens, 1859), Thomas’s Hamlet(Opéra, 1868), and Reyer’s Sigurd (Brussels, 1884; theaction takes place partly in Iceland). A fifth, Saint-Saëns’sLa Princesse jaune, will be discussed below. The followingare located in what are today Poland or Russia: Bizet’s IvanIV (composed in 1865 but then abandoned), Joncières’sDimitri (Théâtre national lyrique, 1876), and Chabrier’sLe Roi malgré lui (Opéra-Comique, 1887). Acts II and IIIof Meyerbeer’s L’Étoile du Nord (Opéra-Comique, 1854)are set in Russia; act I takes place in Vyborg, a long-Finnish town that Russia would conquer in World War II.16See Annelies Andries, “Uniting the Arts to Stage theNation: Le Sueur’s Ossian (1804) in Napoleonic Paris,”Cambridge Opera Journal 31, nos. 2–3 (2020): 153–87.

17See the recording and book of essays, published in 2016by the Centre de musique romantique française at thePalazzetto Bru Zane (Ediciones singulares, ES1026); alsoJames Porter, Beyond Fingal’s Cave: Ossian in the MusicalImagination (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press,2019), 57–71. The orchestra is not reduced in size; rather,Méhul indicates that the violinists should play the viola parts(along with the violists). This gives the topmostmelody linesmuch prominence and a deeper coloration than normal.18The various French operas based on novels of Sir WalterScott seem to be of this essentially place-neutral type,e.g., Boieldieu’s La Dame blanche (Opéra-Comique, 1825)and Bizet’s La Jolie Fille de Perth (Théâtre-Lyrique, 1867).19Hugh Macdonald, “Les Anglais,” in his book Beethoven’sCentury: Essays on Composers and Themes (Rochester:University of Rochester Press, 2008), 193–201 (194–95).20The German word “Walzer” means turning-dance.

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scenes involve places and characters that feelmore distinctly different from Here and Us: aVenetian palazzo, complete with a threaten-ingly motoric gambling scene; a cozy Germancottage, ivy-covered, by the Danube; an Italianballad-singer who wanders in from nowhere tosing a Neapolitan song in music featuring a tri-angle and tambourine (he’s actually the devilSpiridion in disguise); and a pair of Gypsies—he (Spiridion, again) with a set of bagpipes, shedancing with a tambourine. The relative nor-mality of the HapsburgMonarchy’s capital citymade these other contrasting locales and identi-ties stand out in their difference.21 Somethingsimilar is true of Halévy’s La Juive, a work setin Konstanz (in southeastern Germany) in1414, the year in which the Catholic Churchheld an important council there that condemnedto death the religious reformers Jan Hus andJerome of Prague. By choosing an emblematichistorical event in that city, the libretto estab-lished a basic equivalence between the onstagelocale and Catholic France, thus putting thebeleaguered (but also conniving and secretive)Jewish goldsmith Éléazar and his naïve adopteddaughter Rachel in sharp relief. Rachel wasgiven a costume that was pointedly designed inultra-modest fashion in accordance with tradi-tional Jewish custom: skirt and sleeves long,the hair entirely covered.22

ITALY, SPAIN, AND PORTUGAL

Two particularly frequent European locales forFrench operas in the various genres—throughoutthe nineteenth century—were Italy and theIberian Peninsula. Both were regions that many

French people could easily visit. Helpfully, theirlanguages were related to French and thus couldbe easily “quoted” from time to time in thelibretto, e.g., the nickname Fra Diavolo (literallyDevilish Brother, for the Italian bandit-chief inAuber’s opera), or toréador (inCarmen and otherworks set in Spain). This added a touch of “localcolor” without becoming incomprehensible, asmight more easily happen if words had beeninserted from, say, Polish or Chinese. Some ofthese little word-citations became so formulaicthat a student of libretti can be tempted to startcounting them: Hervé Lacombe reproduces nofewer than three instances of opéra-comiquesong lyrics that rhyme boléro with fandango(accenting their last syllable, the French way).23

Italy, in obedience to a long literary tradition,was sometimes portrayed as a land of lawless-ness, especially the Papal States and the south-ern portion of the peninsula.24 For example,highwaymen holding up stage coaches is a majorplot element in Auber’s Fra Diavolo, a work thatwent on to become one of the most belovedcomic operas in France and other lands. Berliozinvoked this tradition in the “Chanson de bri-gands” in Lélio, ou Le Retour à la vie, 1831–32,(rev. 1855), and in the last movement of Harolden Italie, 1834.

Italy’s extensive coastline and many portcities (notably Naples) created a major themefor stage works. One example is Léo Delibes’sone-act La Jeune Fille du golfe (The Girl of theGulf [of Naples]), a work apparently intendedfor performance at home or in the voice studioby young women or children. It was published,with piano accompaniment and with all thenecessary spoken dialogue, in the May 1859issue of Le Magasin des demoiselles.25 Thecharacters have quintessentially Italian names(Pietro, Giannetta) or Frenchified equivalents(Zerline). They chat about the pleasures and dan-gers of being on a fishing boat, engage in a bit of

21Further on Le Timbre d’argent, see Hugh Macdonald,Saint-Saëns and the Stage: Operas, Plays, Pageants, aBallet and a Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2019), 20–49. Another Saint-Saëns opera set in a broadly“Germanic” land (the Netherlands) and containing exoticinsertions is La Princesse jaune (see discussion under “EastAsia” p. 106).22See the costume design for Rachel at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b70016824/f1.item.r=halevy%20la%20juive%20costumes.zoom. Further on La Juive, see Diana R.Hallman, trans. Hervé Lacombe, “La Présence des Juifsdans l’opéra français,” in Lacombe, Histoire, II, 969–76, esp.971–73, and Hallman, Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitismin Nineteenth-Century France: The Politics of Halévy’s LaJuive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

23Lacombe, “Writing,” 151–54.24Stendhal writes, at the outset of one novella: “Lemélodramenous a montré si souvent les brigands italiens du seizièmesiècle, et tant de gens en ont parlé sans les connaître, que nousen avonsmaintenant les idées les plus fausses. . . .” (L’Abbessede Castro: Chroniques italiennes, 1832).25“Magasin” here conveyed the double meaning of “Ladies’Magazine” and “Ladies’ Shop”; many pages in each issuewere devoted to fashions in clothing.


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romance, and make numerous references todancing the tarantella.26 The opening numberis a barcarolle-like chorus for the sailors (scoredfor sopranos and altos), and there are only fourmore numbers before the work ends with achorus of rejoicing.27 This modest, utilitarianwork may serve as a reminder of the manydiverse social contexts in which exotic settingsand musical “local color” were enjoyed andpracticed in France.

Of course, an exotic locale, however attractiveinherently, could not ensure that a work wouldreceive frequent performance and thereby attaincommercial success. In the final scene of act I ofBenvenuto Cellini (Opéra, 1838; rev. Weimar,1852), Berlioz and his librettists characterize apublic festival in sixteenth-century Rome asimmensely energetic. Some of the passages forchorus in this uproarious act-finale make use ofunusually complex rhythms to suggest therumor-mongering of hordes of people millingaround in the Piazza Colonna. The intent, surely,was to suggest that Italians were more overtlyemotional and more entertainingly argumenta-tive than people living north of the Alps. Theopera soon failed, mostly because of its problem-atical libretto, whose comic and occasionally vul-gar elements made it a poor fit for the Opéra, butalso because of its music’s unpredictability, atrait that makes the work so fascinating today(and, even now, tricky to perform).

In Verdi’s Les Vêpres siciliennes (Opéra,1855)—set in Palermo in 1282—Procida (thebaritone role) embodies, to some extent, awidely disseminated stereotype about men insouthern Italy, namely that they are stubbornand pugnacious. This Sicilian doctor devoted tooverthrowing the Spanish overlords is, by turns,baleful and irascible. A roughly parallel figure in

Meyerbeer’s Huguenots, the hard-bitten FrenchProtestant soldier Marcel, is deeply suspiciousof the nation’s Catholic rulers, yet, with hisamusing sarcasm, he seems at times to havewan-dered in from an opéra-comique. There is noth-ing humorous about the Spain-hating Procida.

As for Spain itself, its image in the operahouse is generally that of a land of guitars; ofproud, headstrong, or possessive males; of flash-ing-eyed, dark-haired women; of “Gypsies”(bohémiens and bohémiennes) engaged in smug-gling, dancing, fortune-telling, and sexual lasciv-iousness; and of captivating dance rhythms,elaborate guitar-strumming, and certain unusualscales—notably one, sometimes nowadays called“Andalusian,” that may sound like the harmonicminor except that it cadences on the dominantrather than returning to the tonic.28

These images have been reinforced for nearlya century and a half by one rich and omnipresentcultural artifact: Bizet’s Carmen. Yet manyelements familiar to us today from Bizet’smasterpiece can be found in comic operas fromseveral decades earlier. For example, Friedrichvon Flotow’s L’esclave du Camoëns (Opéra-Comique, 1843) gives the Renaissance-eraPortuguese court poet Camoëns (1524–80) afemale Gypsy slave, Griselda, who dances inthe streets, much as Carmen would do twenty-two years later.29 Actually, Bizet’s operamanagedto avoid the single most overused operatic signi-fier of Spain: the under-the-window serenadewith

26Further, see Pauline Girard, Leo Delibes: Itinéraire d'unmusicien des Bouffes-Parisiens à l'Institut (Paris: Vrin,2018), 106–07. A short opera intended for performance inthe home was often called an “opéra de salon.” MarkEverist has identified eighty-eight opéras de salon forthe years 1850–70; the documentation can be located in the“Music in the Second Empire Theatre” database, on the“France: Musiques, Cultures: 1789–1918” site: http://www.fmc.ac.uk/mitset/index.html#/.27The barcarolle is more narrowly identified with Veniceand its boat-filled canals. See sub-section on “styles andrhythmic patterns” in Part 2.

28Peter Manuel, “From Scarlatti to ‘Guantanamera’: DualTonicity in Spanish and Latin American Musics,” Journalof the American Musicological Society 55 (2002): 311–36.Compare Peter Van der Merwe, Roots of the Classical:The Popular Origins of Western Music (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2004), 46, 63–64, 102–03, 144–54, and159–64. Van derMerwe speaks of this harmonic-minor scalecadencing on the dominant note and chord not as evincing“dual tonicity” but as “Phrygian” (and typical of areasaround the Mediterranean, from the Iberian Peninsula tosouthern Italy to the Balkans to the Turkish and Arabworlds). Celsa Alonso calls the same phenomenon the“Andalusian cadence” in her editions and writings, e.g.,Cien años de canción lírica española, ed. Celsa Alonso,vol. 1, Música hispana, Serie C, Antologías 8 (Madrid:Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales, 2001).29Other French operas in which Gypsies sing and dancepublicly (that is, for an onstage audience) includeOffenbach’s La Périchole (Théâtre des variétés, 1868; rev.1874) and Saint-Saëns’s Le Timbre d’argent.

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guitar, which had in recent decades becomeextremely predictable.30

Flotow’s Griselda, we should note, dances inthe streets not for her own delight (as Carmenwill do) but in order to raise funds to help herimpoverished owner, Camoëns, who, havingbeen exiled from Lisbon, is dying of hunger.31

History tells us that he was indeed sent intoexile in the provinces, if only for a few months.That this French opera puts the banished geniusat the center of an opera surely echoed thelongstanding French stereotype—based in parton certain historical realities—of the Iberianlands as suffering under authoritarian, repressiverulers.

Another such stereotype insistently empha-sized the determination of Catholic religiousleaders in Spain to persecute Jews and Muslimsor to suppress uprisings against Spanish controlin the Netherlands and elsewhere. As a result,repressive or politically controlling inquisitorsfrom the Vatican appear in no fewer than fourprominent French operas set in Spain: Gomis’sLe Diable à Seville (Opéra-Comique, 1831—thecomposer was himself a Spaniard), Halévy’sLe Guitarrero (Opéra-Comique, 1841), Auber’sLa Part du diable (Opéra-Comique, 1843), andVerdi’s Don Carlos.32 Indeed, Verdi’s GrandInquisitor is one of the most menacing charac-ters ever to tread the operatic stage.

Life for women under Spanish Catholicism isshown as being rather grim. In Auber’s widelyperformed Le Domino noir (Opéra-Comique,1837), Angèle nearly gets locked up for the restof her life in a convent. Still, this threateningturn of events gave the composer occasion for avery attractive church-like hymn for the nunsand novices. The same plot twist, with an evenmore ethereal women’s chorus, would occur in

act II of Verdi’s Il trovatore (Rome, 1853; revisedfor Paris: Le trouvère, 1857). The delicate sweet-ness of the music in each case presumablyenabled the work to pass as not being anti-Catholic, but the tension and threat inherent inthe dramatic situation clearly echoed centuries-old stereotypes of Spain as a land marked byreligious extremism and by harsher restrictionson its women than was the case “here” (namelyin France or Italy).33

Men in “Spanish” operas are likewise at risk:namely, of being tempted into dueling or ofgetting imprisoned or assassinated. All three ofthese things occur in Massenet’s first full-lengthopera, Don César de Bazan (Opéra-Comique,1872), including, yes, an offstage killing justbefore this otherwise largely comic opera ends.Spanish-controlled Peru is little better, as themale protagonist Piquillo in Offenbach’s LaPérichole discovers when he is unjustly impriso-ned by the unscrupulous, lecherous, and sadisticviceroy Don Andrès de Ribeira.

The categories of “Spanish women and men”did not include gitanas and gitanos (“Gypsies”).Rather, Spain’s Roma or Romanies were under-stood as comprising an internally exotic peoplewithin a land that was already considered half-exotic by the residents of France and otherEuropean lands. Victor Hugo said it plainly:“Spain, too, is the Orient, Spain is halfwayAfrican.”34 The portrayal of Carmen and theother “Gypsy” characters in Bizet’s Carmen isvivid and specific (yet varied, as in the playfulact II Quintet) and has helped that workbecome and remain the single most frequently

30Lacombe, “Writing,” 152–54.31Hervé Lacombe, “L’Espagne à l’Opéra-Comique avantCarmen: Du Guitarrero de Halévy (1841) à Don César deBazan de Massenet (1872),” in Échanges musicaux franco-espagnols XVIIe–XIXe siècles, ed. François Lesure (Paris:Klincksieck, 2000), 161–93.32Hervé Lacombe, “Sur le Guitarrero de Scribe et Halévy:Réflexions sur la dramaturgie lyrique française,” in Actesdu colloque Halévy (16–18 nov. 2000), ed. FrancisClaudon, Gilles de Van, and Karl Leich-Galland(Heilbronn: Musik-Edition Lucie Galland, 2003), 72–87; alsoLacombe, “Writing,” 145.

33Offenbach’s delightful Maître Péronilla (Bouffes-Parisiens, 1878) involves a woman in Spain who, becauseof some trickery, signs two wedding contracts (one civil,the other in church) with different husbands. The civil oneis with a man twice her age whom she abhors; the religiousone is with her true love. The matter is resolved in a courtscene: she marries her true love, and her maiden aunt (oneof the tricksters) marries the old man. See my review ofthe first complete recording: American Record Guide,July/August 2020, pp. 99–100; lightly revised and uploadedto The Arts Fuse: https://artsfuse.org/212974/opera-album-review-offenbach-in-a-spanish-mood-in-a-top-notch-first-recording/.34“L’Espagne c’est encore l’Orient; l’Espagne est à demiafricaine” (from Hugo’s preface to his 1828 poetry collec-tion Les Orientales).


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performed, reworked, and parodied Frenchopera in France and around the world.35

Il trovatore, too, has its own sharply profiledexotic characters, namely Azucena and thechorus of zingari and zingarelle (“Gypsy” menand women). It is thus worth mentioning that,for the work’s 1857 production at the ParisOpéra—in French translation, as Le trouvère—Verdi composed an imaginative ballet repletewith exotic overtones. Certain of the balletnumbers re-used “Gypsy” materials from theopening of act II (the scene with the AnvilChorus and Azucena’s “Stride la vampa”). Inone extended section of the ballet, a dancer por-traying a Gypsy woman, with the obligatoryfortune-telling cards, approaches a series ofSpanish soldiers and, as European literary tradi-tion decreed, tells their fortunes, one by one(though of course wordlessly).36

Parallel to the aforementioned stereotype ofthe oppressive Vatican official, and almost sym-bolic of it at a more personal level, was that ofthe haughty or abusive male head of a Spanishfamily or household, given to overweeningcontrol of his social inferiors, vacuous pride inhis ancestry, and a hypocritical mixture of jeal-ousy and philandering.37 Commentators suchas Stendhal entertained French readers withaccounts of Spanish men behaving with imperi-ous disregard for the rights or feelings of others.38

As Tim Carter has observed with regard toCount Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro and tothe title character in Don Giovanni, Spain—viewed from elsewhere on the Continent—was“European enough to present realistic charactersbut also sufficiently exotic to allow [those cha-racters to engage in] somewhat licentious behav-ior” on stage.39

Indeed, a man’s inappropriate sexual desire isat the core not just of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figarobut also of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, basedon a play—likewise by the French playwrightBeaumarchais—that presented earlier eventsinvolving some of the same Spanish characters.(Both Mozart’s Figaro and Rossini’s Barber,though composed in Italian, were often performedin translation in Francophone cities.) The sameignoble trait crops up also in French operas thatare set in Spain and thatwerewritten in French.

One witty instance is Adam’s Le Toréador, ouL’Accord parfait (Opéra-Comique, 1849), whichconcerns a French-born flutist, Tracolin, who isliving in Barcelona and seeking to develop a rela-tionship with Coraline, the Spanish-born wife ofa retired bullfighter, Don Belflor. Tracolin easilytempts Belflor into trying to seduce Caritéa, awoman who lives just a few houses away fromBelflor and Coraline. Tracolin’s plan is to makeDon Belflor’s imminent misbehavior known toCoraline, and then to denounce her bullfighter-husband as faithless so that the flutist himselfcan win Coraline’s heart. Belflor takes the baitbut eventually realizes that he has been a fool.The opera ends with a neat solution: Coralineand the men happily form a ménage à trois, inwhich the flutist will, so he claims, “stay as hos-tage” in the house (rester en otage) in order toensure that the husband not visit other women.This plot resolutionwas risqué by themoral stan-dards of the day. Presumably, having the operaset in a Spanish city, rather than a French one,made the implications of sexual promiscuity eas-ier for respectable audiencemembers to swallow,especially since this particular easy-going three-some involved awoman and twomen rather thana man with multiple women. The latter was of

35On the roots ofCarmen in accepted lore about Spain and its“Gypsies,” and on its history in performance (and publica-tion), see Locke, Musical Exoticism, 160–74, and four recentbooks: Hugh Macdonald, Bizet (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2014), 208–33, 238; Michael Christoforidis andElizabeth Kertesz, Carmen and the Staging of Spain:Recasting Bizet’s Opera in the Belle Epoque (London:Oxford University Press, 2018); Carmen Abroad: Bizet’sOpera on the Global Stage, ed. Richard Langham Smithand Clair Rowden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2020); and Richard Langham Smith, Bizet’s CarmenUncovered (Woodbridge, Surrey, UK: Boydell Press, 2021).36Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi, vol. 2 (London:Oxford University Press, 1978), 107–11. Verdi’s revisionsfor Paris included expanding the very end of the opera bythirty measures (which recall material from earlier acts).For more detail on the Trouvère ballet and its Gypsies,see Knud Arne Jürgensen, The Verdi Ballets (Parma:Istituto nazionale di studi verdiani, 1995), 57–77.37Lacombe, “Writing,” 143–45.38Stendhal [Henri Beyle], Mémoires d’un touriste, 2 vols.(Paris: M. Lévy, 1854), II, 293, discussed further in Ralph P.Locke, “Doing the Impossible: On the Musically Exotic,”Journal of Musicological Research 27, no. 4 (2008): 334–58(338–47, 357). Two Spanish noblemen respond “proudly”

(according to the stage directions) inMassenet’s Le Cid. (Seeone instance in n. 89.)39Tim Carter, Understanding Italian Opera (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2015), 119.

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course the typical arrangement inmany operas ofthe period involving a Middle Eastern harem.

THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE AND, AT TIMES,SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

The Western Hemisphere and sub-SaharanAfrica can perhaps best be discussed together.Not only had the two regions been explored andcolonized by Europe over the course of severalcenturies, but they had long been cruelly—andprofitably—linked by the trans-Atlantic slavetrade. They thus lent themselves to similar sto-ries of conquest and intercultural conflict, bond-age, and exploitation. Spontini’s Fernand Cortez,ou La Conquête du Mexique (Opéra, 1809; rev.1817), for example, deals with the Spanish con-quest of Mexico. Decades later, Meyerbeer’sL’Africaine (Opéra, 1865; first drafted in the1840s–50s) would tell a somewhat similar storyabout the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gamaand his trips around the southern tip of Africa.

Criticism of the depredations of conquest anddomination tends to be less overt in such worksthan in a prominent Enlightenment-era opera,Rameau’sLes Indes galantes (1735–36; especiallythe entrée entitled “Les Incas du Pérou”).40 Theseearly- to mid-nineteenth-century “Age of Dis-covery” operas, to use James Parakilas’s phrase,tend not to be strongly racialist in outlook. Theytherefore allow at least the possibility that the“native” heroine could move toward happinessby adopting the religion of the European manwho has conquered her and her people.41 Laterin the century, as racial categories harden in thewritings of Renan, Gobineau, and others, aromantic union between individuals from dif-ferent ethno-racial populations is nearly alwayspresented as doomed.42

The extensive Canadian territories ownedby France did not get much attention on theFrench operatic stage, perhaps because theywere considered too similar to “home” to be fas-cinating.43 By contrast, the similarly vast regionslying along the Mississippi and known to theFrench as “Louisiane” contained significantFrench-owned plantations worked by enslavedpersons of African ancestry, as did numerousimportant Caribbean islands, e.g., Guadeloupe,Martinique, and Saint-Domingue/Haïti.44 Theselocations—and other Caribbean islands—wereevidently quite attractive for operatic portrayal.As parallel evidence of this in instrumentalgenres, we might point to the success, inFrance and elsewhere, of New Orleans-bornLouis-Moreau Gottschalk’s 1850s piano piecesinspired by Creole and Afro-American music:e.g., Le Banjo; Ojos criollos: Danse cubaine;and Souvenir de Porto Rico: Marche des gibaros.

Two intriguing comic operas take place in theCaribbean region. Le Planteur (Opéra-Comique,1839) is set in Louisiana, some miles from NewOrleans. The music is by Hippolyte Monpou.Characters include—besides various “mulatto”women and enslaved Blacks—an English colo-nist named Jakson; an American named ArthurBarcley; Jenny Makensie, a cousin of Barcley’s;and a mulatto man, Caton, who is Jenny’s facto-tum. The opera presents the colonists as havinga natural human warmth and simplicity rarelyencountered in the big European cities.45 Thework thus applies to a modern intercultural

40See Locke, Musical Exoticism, 100–05, and Music andthe Exotic, 235–38.41See James Parakilas, “The Soldier and the Exotic:Operatic Variations on a Theme of Racial Encounter,” part1, Opera Quarterly 10, no. 2 (1993): 33–56.42Two renowned instances: Bizet’s Carmen and Delibes’sLakmé; for such operas, Parakilas has created the categoryof “the Soldier and the Exotic” (to be discussed in Part 2 ofthis article). Influential racialist books of the period includeErnest Renan’s preface to his L’Avenir de la science:Pensées de 1848 (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1890); and Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau’s Essay sur l’inégalité des races

humaines (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1853–55). See, for example,Shmuel Almog, “The Racial Motif in Renan's Attitude toJews and Judaism,” in Antisemitism through the Ages, ed.Shmuel Almog (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 255–78.43Interestingly, Rossini’s early farsa entitled La cambiale dimatrimonio had a Canadian trader—perhaps a fur-trapper—in the man-of-reason baritone role (Slook).44France sold its holdings on the North American mainlandto the United States in 1803 (the Louisiana Purchase, or, inFrench, Vente de la Louisiane).45Several of the names are simplified or misspelled (Jakson,Barcley, Makensie), perhaps in part to clarify the pronuncia-tion. I consulted the Library of Congress’s copy of thelibretto, available at https://www.loc.gov/item/2010659171/.For a detailed appreciation of Le Planteur and its unusuallyfrank treatment of chattel slavery, see Helena KopchickSpencer, “Louisiana Imagined: Gender, Race and Slavery inLe Planteur (1839),” in America in the French Imaginary,1789–1914: Music, Revolution and Race, ed. Diana Hallmanand César Leal (Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: Boydell,forthcoming).


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setting an age-old trope from the literary pastoral,which projected kindness and other humanevalues onto (idealized) shepherds and peasants.

Clapisson’s Le Code noir (Opéra-Comique,1842) derives from an influential novel byFanny Reybaud. The opera’s main character,Donatien, was born in Martinique but educatedin France. Upon returning to the island, he isdenounced as a mulatto and therefore legally aslave. The opera greatly toned down the politicalpositions expressed in the novel. Nonetheless, itmaintained the highly dramatic scene in whichDonatien is put up for sale at a slave auction.46

The work’s librettist, Eugène Scribe, clearlyrelished the opportunity to weigh in on animportant current issue. Two years later, hewould sign a petition for abolishing slavery inFrench-owned territories.47 This policy wouldindeed be put into place in 1848 during the earlymonths of the Second Republic.

Brazil was the center of attention in two suc-cessful comic works with spoken dialogue by,respectively, Félicien David and JacquesOffenbach. In David’s La Perle du Brésil(Opéra-National, 1851, rev. 1858), whose charac-ters are mostly Portuguese, the title character isa native Brazilian woman, Zora.48 Her big aria,“Charmant oiseau,” with its captivating partfor solo flute, became one of the most cherishedFrench numbers for coloratura soprano andremained so long after the opera ceased to berevived on stage. This aria is still performedand recorded today (e.g., by Sumi Jo).49 The flutehere represents a supposed Brazilian bird, themysoli. (No such species exists, except, by now,in the imaginations of fans of coloratura arias.)

The presence of a bird facilitated the inclusionof such a florid aria, which otherwise might haveseemed inconsistent with Zora’s modest ori-gins.50 It also had the advantage—as did the fluteand soprano’s echo-like exchanges ofmusicalized“twittering”—of linking this particular exoticfemale character with the beauties of nature.This linkage occurs, but without the pseudo-birdsong, in other nineteenth-century operas;examples include the Flower Duet in Delibes’sLakmé and the nighttime-by-the-Nile scene inAida.51

A wealthy Brazilian man is a prominent char-acter in Offenbach’s La Vie parisienne (ParisianLife; Théâtre du Palais-Royal, 1866; rev.Théâtre des Variétés, 1873), one of the fewOffenbach stage works that are performed fre-quently today. This “Brésilien” is wealthy butuncouth, having come to Paris to spend moneyand indulge his voracious tastes. He is not evengiven the dignity of a name. In the original pro-duction, he was a man of apparently mixed race,with dark curly hair, and, in act V, he appearedoutfitted in full Brazilian carnival regalia,including a sombrero with hanging pomponsto match the ones dangling from his trouser-legs.52 As Jacek Blaszkiewicz argues, thisnameless foreign sybarite may also have beena kind of lightning rod for French anxietiesabout the provincialism of France itself, asincreasing numbers of wealthy people camefrom other lands to visit Paris and to treat them-selves, as one says, royally. Indeed, Brazil washardly a backwater by this point: long ownedand controlled by Portugal until it establishedits independence in 1825, Brazil had, within

46There is likewise a dramatic slave-auction scene inMonpou’s Le Planteur.47Eugène Scribe, Le Code noir: Opéra-comique, suivi dedocuments inédits, ed. Olivier Bara and Roger Little (Paris:L’Harmattan, 2018). Also Olivier Bara, “Figures d’esclavesà l’opéra: Du ‘Code noir’ à ‘l’Africaine’ d’Eugène Scribe(1842–1865), les contradictions de l’imaginaire libéral,” inLittérature et Esclavage, XVIIIe-XIXe siècles, ed. SargaMoussa (Paris: Desjonquères, 2010), 110–23, https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00909738.48On an important comic opera that was set in DutchGuyana, Halévy’s Jaguarita l’Indienne (Théâtre-Lyrique,1855), see n. 88.49See the recording on her aria-album Carnival! (Decca440679, released 1994; English Chamber Orchestra, cond.Richard Bonynge) or her 1995 concert performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElfDq2IGspQ.

50Other opéras-comiques that similarly use birdsong as anoccasion for florid vocalizing include A. E. M. Grétry’sZémire et Azor (Comédie-italienne, 1771) and VictorMassé’s Les Noces de Jeannette (Opéra-Comique, 1853).51On the association of exotic women characters with natu-ral surroundings (versus government, war, etc.), see Locke,Musical Exoticism, 184–92. Regarding women characters,generally, and gardens, see Helena Kopchick Spencer, Thejardin des femmes as Scenic Convention in French Operaand Ballet (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 2014), and her“Le Divertissement dansé,” in Lacombe, Histoire, 316–24.52Jacek Blaszkiewicz, “Writing the City: The CosmopolitanRealism of Offenbach’s La Vie Parisienne,” CurrentMusicology 103 (2018): 67–96; costume design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Draner_-_La_Vie_Parisienne,_le_br%C3%A9silien.jpeg. A photo also exists of the singer(known as Brasseur) in that very costume.

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many people’s memory, been for a decade or sothe center of the small but potent Portugueseempire; the Portuguese royal family and adminis-tration had relocated there in 1808 as a result ofNapoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula.

It seems significant that the land from whichthis carefree hedonist in La Vie parisiennecomes is one that had been a colony of somenation other than France. In selecting Brazil,the librettists avoided the risk of commentingdirectly on France’s policies toward its own colo-nies in the Caribbean, North Africa, SoutheastAsia, and the Pacific. Or indeed in Guyane(French Guiana), which had been a French col-ony since 1643 and which—as some audiencemembers surely knew well—borders on Brazil,the land of Offenbach’s boisterous sombrero-wearer and David’s Zora and her colorful, mellif-luous mysoli bird.53

Somuch for representing Americans, whetherthey had some African ancestry or not.54 As forfully sub-Saharan African characters, one mightexpect that they would be numerous, especiallyafter the French conquest of lands in westernAfrica such as Sénégal. Yet there were few sub-Saharans (noirs, nègres) on the operatic stage inFrance—or indeed elsewhere in Europe—duringthe nineteenth century.55 Performers with dark-ened skin, brown tights, and so on were usedmore readily in ballets—often as a group fromsome “Elsewhere,” such as Nubia—and as super-numeraries, e.g., servants at a court. The mostprominent character with dark hair and darkishskin to hold the stage in any opera performedfrequently in France, aside from the title rolein Verdi’s Aida/Aïda, was Sélika, the African

queen in Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine. The imperi-ous Sélika attracts the attentions of both thePortuguese explorer Vasco da Gama and herown countryman Nélusko. In act III, the latterleads an insurrectionof his fellow slaves againsttheir Portuguese captors. Sélika thus bears astrong resemblance to other exotic femmesfatales of the era.

Sélika’s geographical origin is somewhat con-fused and her ethnic/“racial” identity a bitvague. At first, Meyerbeer and his librettistScribe placed the opera on the African continentitself (at the source of the Niger River, with thelocals referring at times to Islam and their pro-genitor, Ishmael); then they revised it to takeplace in India (renaming it Vasco da Gama).The version that was finally performed, super-vised by other hands, a year after Meyerbeer’sdeath, split the difference by restoring thework’soriginal title; by locating Sélika and her realm,not on the African mainland, but rather on anunnamed island off its coast (in the IndianOcean); and by giving the island Hindu religiouscustoms, hardly typical of Africa. Perhaps therevising team had in mind Madagascar orMauritius.56

L’Africaine went on to have a substantialcareer on the world’s operatic stages, often inItalian translation. Particularly beloved was, and

53Indeed, in 1809 the French lost Guyane to the Portuguese;they regained it in 1814. Guyane remains today a Frenchdépartement: the only mainland American territory that isstill a fully integrated part of a European nation.54“Indians”—that is, Native Americans—were rarely repre-sented in French operas of this era.55Among the few exceptions, there is a Black slave inAmbroise Thomas’s Le Roman d’Elvire (Opéra-Comique,1860): Lacombe, “Writing,” 140. On the complex relation-ship between the operatic world and Blackness (whetherCaribbean or sub-Saharan), see Blackness in Opera, ed.Naomi André, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor (Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 2012), and Naomi André, BlackOpera: History, Power, Engagement (Urbana: University ofIllinois Press, 2018).

56The population of Mauritius was in the mid-nineteenthcentury largely Hindu (and still is today), though it wasapparently uninhabited in the days of Vasco da Gama. Acontemporary illustration of the first-night cast ofL’Africaine shows Sélika with dark, wild hair and her malecounterpart, Néluskowith particularly dark skin. It is repro-duced in Locke, “Territoires,” 951. Even if the skin makeupwas not carried out so consistently in the theater, thepublished descriptions and the illustrations in magazinesand on the title pages of scores could help reinforce a charac-ter’s “racial” identity. Regarding the complex composi-tional history of L’Africaine, see John H. Roberts,“Meyerbeer: Le Prophète and L’Africaine,” in The CambridgeCompanion to Grand Opera, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2003), 222–32; TommasoSabbatini,“GenealogiadiSélika,” inLaFeniceprimadell’opera(program book of the Teatro La Fenice, Venice), 2013–2014,no. 1 (November 2013): 27–44, available online at https://www.teatrolafenice.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/africane.pdf; and two articles byGabriela Cruz: “Laughing at History:The Third Act of Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine,” CambridgeOpera Journal 11, no. 1 (1999): 31–76, and “Meyerbeer’sMusic of the Future,” Opera Quarterly 25, nos. 3–4 (2009):169–202.


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still is, Vasco da Gama’s “Pays merveilleux . . . Ôparadis!” (“Oparadiso!”)—an aria of wondermentat the riches andmajestic beauty of a land that allEurope, through da Gama, is here espying for thefirst time.57 The concluding lines, coordinatingwith a long-held high Bb, state plainly the imperi-alist ideology of possession and plunder:

Ô trésors charmants,Ô merveilles, salut!Monde nouveau, tu m’appartiens,Sois donc à moi, ô beau pays!

(Oh, enchanting treasures,Hail, oh, wonders!New world, you belong to me,Therefore be mine, oh, beautiful land!)

EAST ASIA (AND, AS A KIND OF ANNEX:POLYNESIA)

East Asia, like sub-Saharan Africa, may havebeen thought difficult to portray effectively onstage. Saint-Saëns reports that when he proposedwriting an opera set in Japan to Camille duLocle, director of the Opéra-Comique, “the veryidea of putting Japan itself on the stage scaredhim; he asked us to tone things down.”58 Theresult was La Princesse jaune (The YellowPrincess; Opéra-Comique, 1872), a one-act workset entirely in the Netherlands. The work’s title,which sounds racist to present-day ears, was, incontext, ironic. The character never appears inthe opera; indeed she exists only in the mainmale character’s drug-addled imagination.59

East Asia found a warmer welcome—nottoned down but cranked up—in a more extreme

form of comic opera: operetta, often known inFrance as opéra-bouffe. There, realism wasnot the point; or, put differently, reality oftenwore extravagant, even ludicrous foreign dis-guise. Two works by Offenbach, Ba-Ta-Clan(“chinoiserie musicale”; Bouffes-Parisiens,1855) and L’Île de Tulipatan (Bouffes-Parisiens,1868), demonstrate a tendency to use East andSoutheast Asian lands as settings in which com-mentary on life in Europe could be amusinglyexpressed. Readers in English-speaking landshave a sense of how this can work from Gilbertand Sullivan’s TheMikado, a work that outfittedan imaginary Japan with various English types—light-hearted schoolgirls and ineffectual govern-mental ministers—barely disguised.

Ba-Ta-Clan—whosename,minusthehyphens,would seven years later be applied to a pagoda-shaped theater (a café-concert) in Paris’s eleventharrondissement—takes place in China.60 Thecharacters are given ludicrous names, such asFé-ni-han, i.e., fainéant (“do-nothing” or “uselessperson”). At first, they sing only bizarre nonsensesyllables, as if mocking the presumed incompre-hensibility of all things Chinese. But they eventu-ally admit to one another that they are French.(Presumably they are wearing such things as pig-tail wigs and “slanted” eye makeup.) One man,for example, is son of a Parisian laundress, fromrue Mouffetard on the Left Bank. The charactersmake musical jokes about currently fashionableFrench and Italian operas and soon all but one ofthem head back home.

L’Île de Tulipatan pokes fun at pompous gov-ernmental rulers: in this case, the island’s RoiCacatois XXII, who sports another joking namereferring at once to the cockatoo (the word forwhich can be spelled exactly this way in French,or else as cacatoës or cacatoès) plus “caca.” Theruler is thus at once King Cockatoo XXII andKing Shit-on-You XXII. The show twits oppres-sive norms of male and female behavior—forexample: all boys and no girls want to be soldierswho love guns and war—such as could easily befound in the France of Offenbach’s day and can

57One can enjoy it in splendidly healthy recordings fromthe past century and more, e.g., by Caruso, Domingo, andAlagna.58“Le Japon tout pur, mis à la scène, lui faisait peur; il nousdemanda de le mitiger,” Camille Saint-Saëns: Écrits sur lamusique et les musiciens 1870–1921, ed. Marie-GabrielleSoret (Paris: Vrin, 2012), 751. For parallel (but also distinctive)complications and sensitivities with regard to portrayals ofJapan in American music (including opera, the Broadwaymusical, and film), see W. Anthony Sheppard, ExtremeExoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination(New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).59The work’s similarly quirky use of exotic styles (EastAsian but also Middle Eastern) is discussed in Part 2 ofthe present article.

60In recent years, the Bataclan hall has often been used forrock and other pop-music concerts. This is the hall atwhich armed terrorists (apparently affiliated with ISIS)killed dozens of concertgoers on 13 November 2015.

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no doubt be found today more or less anywhere.A revealing hint: there is, on maps, no islandcalled Tulipatan. The location—presumablysomewhere in the vast Middle East, since tulipswere originally associated with Persia, or even,because it is an island, Indonesia or the Pacific—is nowhere and everywhere.61

André Messager’s Madame Chrysanthème(Théâtre de la Renaissance, 1893) is set in con-temporaneous Japan. The work had a limitedsuccess and eventually vanished from the reper-tory, except for one lusciously sad nature aria forthe title character (“Le jour, sous le soleil béni”).Its many other fascinations include a colonialmale figure who is not Iberian (as in FernandCortez or L’Africaine) or English (as in Lakmé)but French, bearing the generic name Pierre.Madame Chrysanthème, almost more than anyother work mentioned in the present article, de-serves an extended study, and not only becauseit draws creatively on the Pierre Loti novel ofthe same name, a sneering account of Japaneselife that would some years later become an indi-rect source for Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.62

Auber’s tuneful opéra-comique Le Cheval debronze (Opéra-Comique, 1835) is notable for itspointed critique of the privileged classes, whichare represented by the mandarin Tsing-Sing—governor of the local region—and by PrinceYang, the ruler of the vast province of

Shantung (today: Shandong). Tsing-Sing’s fourwives treat him so mercilessly that, as a localfarmer explains, he has become betrothed to afifth woman “in order to have someone he canboss around” (“pour commander à quelqu’un”).The farmer also explains that Tsing-Sing is, inhis official functions, greedy and punitive, show-ing up once a year “to grab our money or to beatus with sticks” (“pour toucher notre argent ounous donner des coups de bâton”). As for theall-powerful Prince Yang, he is oblivious to theneeds of his subjects. The carefree refrain of hisentrance-song says it all:

Ne blâmer rien,Trouver tout bien,C’est le systèmeQue j’aime.63

(Never criticize,accept everything as it is.That’s the kind of systemI like.)

Audience members at the many theaters inFrance and other lands where Le Cheval debronze was performed could, no doubt, easilyimagine rulers and bureaucrats nearer to homewho resembled the lazy, greedy officials in thisimagined version of a rigidly hierarchical, comi-cally cruel China.

Just at the end of the century, a compact workby the precocious Reynaldo Hahn (he wrotemost of it at eighteen; it reached performancefive years later) appeared and pushed the por-trayal of East Asia into new, dreamier realms:indeed, its title is L’Île du rêve (The Isle ofDreams, subtitled idylle polynésienne; Opéra-Comique, 1898). Hahn’s opera is based on anovel by the aforementioned Pierre Loti (pseudo-nym of Louis Marie-Julien Viaud), Le Mariage deLoti (1880), which had already left an impact onDelibes’s Lakmé. L’Île du rêve, in three shortacts that might better be called “scenes,” tellsof a Breton sailor who stops on the island ofTahiti, where he is given a new name, Loti, andis welcomed by a native woman, Mahénu(Rarahu in the novel), withwhomhe falls in love,as she does with him. Georges (Loti) then returns

61Three other cases of savages in Offenbach’s works occurin Oyayaye, ou La Reine des îles (an anthropophagie musi-cale [i.e., “amusical case of humans eating humans”]; Foliesnouvelles, 1855),Vent du soir, ou L’Horrible Festin (Bouffes-Parisiens, 1857), which likewise involves cannibalism; andRobinson Crusoé (Opéra-Comique, 1867). They are set,respectively, on a Pacific island, on an “isle de l'Océanie,”and off the coast of Venezuela.62I am currently completing a study of how exoticism func-tions in a small number of quite varied French comic operasand operettas, including one set in Spain-controlled Peru(Offenbach’s La Périchole), two in East Asia (Auber’s LeCheval de bronze, Messager’s Madame Chrysanthème),one on the Indian subcontinent and in what is todayUzbekistan (Félicien David’s Lalla-Roukh), two in the Arabworld (Ambroise Thomas’s Le Caïd—Opéra-Comique,1849; Bizet’s Djamileh—Opéra-Comique, 1872), one in aTurkish embassy (complete with a Greek harem womanbeing held captive) in modern-day Paris (Auber’s LeMaçon—Opéra-Comique, 1825), and one (Chabrier’sL’Étoile) in a pointedly vague “Orient” that barely concealsits barbed portrayal of social and political life in the Parisof the 1870s. On the special problems of “representing”an exotic Other land and people in the comic genres, seethe astute remarks in Lacombe, “Writing,” 157–58. 63Act 1, scene 5.


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to France, leaving the young woman (whom hecalls enfant—child) disconsolate. We also learnalong the way of a previous visit by George’sbrother to the same village, and we meet thewoman that he abandoned, Téria, who has gonemad from grief.

Told this way, thework sounds like a compact(one-hour-long) re-do of Madame Chrysanthèmeand anticipation of Madama Butterfly. (Anextended episode involving a ridiculous oldChinese man anticipates the Prince Yamadoriscene in Butterfly.) But Hahn purposefullyblunted the dramatic potential of the plot, avoid-ing sharply defined characters and making themusic continuous rather than full of contrast.With its redoubling of the plot, L’Île du rêve iscloser to myth than to tragedy.64

In this respect, and with its prevailing slowpace and highly nuanced orchestration, it is oftenanalogous to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande,which (though composed in 1893–98) would nothave its first performance until 1902.65 If Asiaand the Pacific islands had once been a region ofimaginary escape for somewhat bored Westerncity-dwellers, and highly precise in its detail(as it would remain in Madama Butterfly), inHahn’s highly Symbolist-tinted work such landswere themselves escaping from the demands ofrealistic portrayal and generating instead a kindof trance-inducing mist.66

THE EXTENDED MIDDLE EAST

(FROM MOROCCO TO INDIA)

The exotic region that was most frequentlyselected by composers and librettists of French

opera—and the one that produced more worksthat remain in the international repertorytoday—is what we might call “the extendedMiddle East.” This (super-)region was widelyunderstood as stretching fromMorocco eastwardto India and Ceylon, thus including what, inmodern terms, are called North Africa,Southwest Asia (today’s Turkey, Lebanon, Syria,and Israel/Palestine, plus the entire ArabianPeninsula and Iran), and the vast Indian subconti-nent. Few distinctions were made between loca-tions as distant and different from each other as,say, Algiers and Isfahan. All were often subsumedunder the simple term l’Orient.67

In the imagination of artists and public alike,the extended Middle East (again: Morocco toCeylon) tended to bemarked by a set of recurringimages and characteristics including caravans;Islamic religion or, in ancient times or in Indiaand Ceylon, polytheism; highly authoritarianand often arbitrarily harsh rulers (an overlapwith what we saw in regard to China); theharem, understood largely as a group of indolentwomen, each seeking to become la favorite ofthe all-powerful pasha or sultan; and much feud-ing between tribes and other power-hungrygroups and individuals. This was especially truewhen a work evoked either the Middle East ofrecent centuries or the tales of the ThousandandOne Nights. (Works set in the biblical worldor the ancient Middle East—e.g., pharaonicEgypt—form a distinct category, as wewill see.)68

64See some illustrations, plus numerous perceptive commentsfrom Hahn and contemporary observers, in the small bookaccompanying the world-premiere recording, conducted byHervé Niquet, in the “French Opera” series produced by theCentre de musique romantique française (Bru Zane BZ1043,1 CD). My review of that recording+book is at The Arts Fuse:https://artsfuse.org/226075/opera-cd-review-two-splendid-world-premiere-recordings-rediscover-an-exotic-master-of-song-reynaldo-hahn/. Further illustrations and contemporaryreviews are available online at https://reynaldo-hahn.net/Html/operasIDR.htm.65Another resemblance: both composers took exquisitecare to render the sung text in a natural, not stentorianmanner.66See n. 64. On the interaction between symbolism andexoticism around 1900, see my Musical Exoticism, 214–21.

67For an overview of musical representations of the“extended Middle East” (including the biblical world,ancient Egypt, and the Arab and Turkish lands), see my“Cutthroats.” I discuss two “Middle Eastern” operas indetail in the following three articles: “Beyond the Exotic”;“Aida and Nine Readings of Empire”; and “Constructingthe Oriental ‘Other’: Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila,”Cambridge Opera Journal 3:2 (1991): 261–302. The “NineReadings” article is reprinted in shortened and lightlyrevised form in Fashions and Legacies, ed. Marvin andPoriss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),152–75. The Samson et Dalila article appeared in shortenedand lightly revised form, with a new introductory section, inThe Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and SexualDifference, ed. Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 161–84.Samson et Dalila and three French operas set in India orCeylon (Les Pêcheurs de perles, Lakmé and Le roi deLahore) are also discussed inmyMusical Exoticism, 175–202.68A further terminological oddity: archaeologists still callthe world of the bible and the pharaohs “the ancient NearEast,” even though the same territory is, in the present-

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In the case of a work set on the Indian subcon-tinent, the religion alluded to was sometimesHinduism, telegraphed to the audience by refer-ence to “our gods” in the plural (“nos dieux”), aphrase otherwise mainly encountered in worksset in ancient Greece or Rome. But we shouldremember that much of the Indian subcontinentwas under Muslim (Mughal) control in the six-teenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. As a result,the religion of its rulers was monotheistic (as ofcourse was true of Islam everywhere), and theregion had many cultural customs in commonwith those of the Arab and Ottoman-Turkishlands (such as the harem or, more generally, aman’s taking multiple wives). This made it eas-ier than one might think today to subsumeIndia into a single category with the lands ofthe Arabs, Turks, and Persians.

Some of the real or supposed ethnic and reli-gious characteristics or stereotypes just men-tioned were inherited from eighteenth-century“Turkish” operas set in the region, e.g., byGluck, Grétry, Mozart, and Salieri. Salieri’sastonishingly blunt Tarare (Opéra, 1787) fea-tures a vicious, selfish king who was explicitlyintended as a symbol of despotism withinEurope or, more particularly, France.69

BIBLICAL AND OTHER OPERAS SET IN THE

ANCIENT MIDDLE EAST

Biblical operas were few in nineteenth-centuryFrance because they risked drawing attacks fromthe clergy. Yet some managed to be staged, evento be hailed and oft-performed. And, of course,

nearly all were, by definition, located in ancientPalestine or Egypt. Such operas, in the earlynineteenth century, did not yet show, muchless feature, the ethno-regional traits mentionedabove (e.g., an emphasis on polygamy), pre-sumably because the primary concern wasto keep the tone morally uplifting. Méhul’sJoseph (Opéra-Comique, 1807) disregards theEgyptians in the story almost entirely. Instead,it focuses on the remorse of Joseph’s brothersfor selling him into slavery and then reportinghim dead to their father Jacob. Rossini’s Moïse(Opéra, 1827) likewise centers primarily onHebrew characters; the whole last act is aboutthe crossing of the Red Sea, and the Israelites’gratitude to God.70 Of course, the opera containsa prominent role for the oppressive pharaoh andhis family, but his wife is a secret convert to theIsraelite religion, and his son is in love with aHebrewmaiden. This greatly reduced the oppor-tunities for characterizing the religio-culturalOther.71 In Auber’s L’Enfant prodigue (TheProdigal Son; Opéra, 1850), several characterswere Egyptians; they wore costumes carefullymodeled after visual depictions found onancient bas-reliefs.72 As for the Israelite cha-racters in many of these works (e.g., thoseIsraelites of the Exodus story, or Saint-Saëns’sSamson et Dalila), they were probably under-stood less as early versions of nineteenth-century Jews than as proto-Christians. Thiswas consistent with the centuries-old Christianhermeneutical tradition of using figures in theHebrew Bible as prototypes, or sometimesantitypes, of Jesus and other New Testamentcharacters, and of interpreting the suffering,

day English-speaking world, considered part of the MiddleEast. American political scientists often lump Turkey,Israel, Iran, and the majority-Arab countries together asMENA (“the Middle East and North Africa”). By contrast,the phrase “Near East” (“Proche-Orient,” “Naher Osten,”etc.) is still used by many writers on the EuropeanContinent for what Americans and many Britons call theMiddle East.69Thomas Betzwieser, Exotismus und “Türkenoper” in derfranzösischen Musik des Ancien Régime (Laaber: Laaber,1993), 332–58; John A. Rice, Antonio Salieri and VienneseOpera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 383–420;and Locke, Music and the Exotic, 287–322 (Tarare: 304–07).See my review of the new recording (conducted byChristophe Rousset), American Record Guide, September/October 2019, 137–38, and in the online arts magazine TheArts Fuse: https://artsfuse.org/191785/opera-review-antonio-salieris-tarare-a-startling-opera-of-social-commentary/.

70Its fullest title, though rarely used then or now, isMoïse etPharaon; ou, le Passage de la Mer rouge. Rossini based thework freely on his own Mosè in Egitto, 1818, rev. 1819.71Anselm Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera: MusicTheater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, trans. MaryWhittall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 68–83;Benjamin Walton, Rossini in Restoration Paris (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2007), 154–209.72Nicole Wild, Décors et Costumes du XIXe siècle (Paris:Bibliothèque nationale, 1993), 328; Karen Henson, “Exotismeet Nationalités: Aida à l’Opéra de Paris,” trans. DennisCollins, in L’opéra en France et en Italie (1791–1925): UneScène privilégiée d’échanges littéraires et musicaux (Paris:Société française de musicologie, 2000), 263–97 (279 andplate 20).


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faithful Israelite people as the model of theideal Christian community.73

INCREASING CONTACT WITH, AND KNOWLEDGE

ABOUT, THE MIDDLE EAST

The increasing concern for a degree of historicalaccuracy in the visual depiction of the MiddleEast, mentioned above in regard to Auber’sL’Enfant prodigue, was nourished by the illustra-tions and verbal accounts in the Description del’Egypte, a multi-volume report by a team ofdozens of French scholars, some of whom hadspent substantial time in Egypt in the years1798–1801 beginning with Napoleon’s militaryconquest of Alexandria. The Descriptionreached publication in the years 1809–29 andincluded volumes devoted to music-making,musical instruments, and dance in both ancientand current-day Egypt. The numerous illus-trated plates in the Description soon influencedFrench architecture, furniture design, and thelike: as Hervé Lacombe notes, “Empire” stylefeatured “lotus capitals, sphinxes, obelisks,and pyramids.”74 Prominent literary figuresalso began traveling to “the East” (e.g., Egyptor Algeria), among them Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Nerval, andFlaubert, together with such important paintersas Decamps, Vernet, Delacroix, and Chassériau.75

A more concretely musico-depictive impulsecame from Le Désert, a concert work of 1844for tenor, male chorus, orchestra and narratorthat was set in the Arab world. It was com-posed by Félicien David, a native of Provencewho had studied for a few years at the ParisConservatoire. Le Désert was first heard at thedistinguished Salle du Conservatoire and itinstantly became the talk of the town. Moreperformances followed within the comingweeks and months, including some conductedby Berlioz or by David himself. The work waseventually performed and published in numer-ous lands, often in translation.

LeDésertwas the first notable Europeanworkby a composer who had direct knowledge of lifein the Middle East (or any other non-Europeanregion). Thirteen years earlier (1831), David haddropped out of the Conservatoire to join theSaint-Simonians, an early (or “utopian”) social-ist movement. Soon after, in 1833, he was oneof several dozen Saint-Simonians who spenttwo years in Turkey, Palestine, and Egypt andwho traveled to “the Orient” to promote theirdoctrines of the dignity of labor and the equalityof the sexes.76 Le Désert incorporates severalmelodies that David had heard in his travelsand, more generally, focuses on daily life in theregion: the lumbering progress of a caravanacross the arid wastes, a sandstorm, womendancing at evening, an equestrian contest, and amuezzin giving out, in Arabic, the call toworship(“God is great, come to prayer”).77 Exoticism atone point becomes a form of social critique,namely in a male chorus extolling the freedomof life in the desert and denouncing “[you]pale inhabitants of the city” (members of theaudience!) who are locked away in your immo-bile “tombs of stone” (i.e., solid houses, ratherthan conveniently portable tents).

It was no doubt in response to the impact ofLe Désert and of the increasing French coloniza-tion of North Africa that, later in the century,operas featuring ancient Hebrews and early

73See Locke, “Constructing the Oriental ‘Other’,” 271, 274.74Hervé Lacombe, The Keys to French Opera in theNineteenth Century, trans. Edward Schneider (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2001), 180.75Lacombe, Keys, 179–86.

76They also had a plan for cutting a canal through theIsthmus of Suez, which they believed would facilitateinternational trade and thus advance the cause of worldpeace. The plan was of course adopted decades later, underthe auspices of several governments and major banks.77For fuller accounts of LeDésert, see Hagan, Félicien David,67–86; Richard Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music,6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 3:386–92;my Music, Musicians, and the Saint-Simonians (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1986), 208–12; Robert Laudon,The Dramatic Symphony: Issues and Explorations fromBerlioz to Liszt (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2012), 81–98,101, 112, 132 (possible influence on act I prelude toWagner’s Lohengrin), and 133–34; my “Cutthroats,” 30–32;and my chapter “The French Symphony: David, Gounod,and Bizet to Saint-Saëns, Franck, and Their Followers,” inThe Nineteenth-Century Symphony, ed. D. Kern Holoman(New York: Schirmer Books, 1997), 163–94. In the “FrenchSymphony” chapter, I erroneously stated that the spokennarration is unrhymed. On the two recordings of the work,see my review of the more recent one (conducted byLaurence Equilbey) on Naïve CD 5405: American RecordGuide 78:4 (2015): 96–97; updated (with various Internetlinks) at http://www.operatoday.com/content/2015/11/a_prize-winning.php.

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Christians would openly revel inMiddle Eastern“local color.” This was often manifested in cos-tume and set designs (as before) but, thanks inlarge part to Le Désert, also now in musicalstyle. For example, troupes of ballerinas in suchoperas tended to be clad in skimpy or gauzyfabrics and to dance to exquisitely sensualmusictinged withmodal degrees (e.g., the lowered sixthand seventh), as when the priestesses of Dagondance and wave their floral garlands enticinglyat the Hebrew warriors in act I of Saint-Saëns’sSamson et Dalila.78

Or such an opera could evoke, in quasi-ethnographic fashion, theMiddle East of the cur-rent day, a familiar instance even today being astrongly Arab-sounding passage—complete withrepeatedly emphasized augmented seconds inthe melody—in the act III Bacchanale from thesame opera. Saint-Saëns later explained that hehad received this melody from a French militaryman who had been prominent in the conquestof Algeria.79 More generally, this opera drama-tizes the tension between the ancient Hebrews,who, as mentioned, “stood in” for modern-dayChristians, and thepaganPhilistines,who tosomeextent may have represented the Ottoman Turksand Arabs: that is, the current-day inhabitants ofthe Holy Lands.

IMAGINING THE MIDDLE EAST OF

EARLY CHRISTIANITY

Three notable works involve the Middle East asit was imagined to have existed two millenniaearlier (what historians and archaeologists callthe “ancient Near East”).80 The exotic locale

can here carry multiple meanings. As often withoperatic works evoking the distant past (e.g.,Baroque operas set in ancient Greece or Rome),the work could either incarnate or criticize theEuropean social values of the composer’s andlibrettist’s own day. But it can also—as is lessoften the case with ancient Greece or Rome—reflect widely shared European attitudes towardthe people who, in the composer’s day, inhabitedthe locale in question. Massenet’s Hérodiade(Brussels, 1881), set in first-century Roman-occupied Judea, puts John the Baptist andSalomé on stage. The latter is here (unlike inRichard Strauss’s German-language Salome;Dresden, 1905) a modest young Jewish womandevoted to the Baptist, as she reveals in herfamous aria “Il est doux, il est bon.” The rapa-cious pagan world—back then but also possibly“now”—is vividly represented by Hérode(Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great). ThisJewish-born ruler of a Roman client-state, andthus a kind of local emperor, is a pitifully weakhuman being, consumed by unprovoked lustfor the virtuous young Salomé in ways that pre-sumably were felt as less threatening when thedepraved male character was a denizen of theMiddle East.81

Some two decades earlier, Félicien David’sHerculanum (Opéra, 1859) presented a similarsituation, but with the genders reversed. Thisopera—once popular, and recently revived tomuch acclaim—takes place in and aroundHerculaneum in 79 A.D., the year when thenearby Mt. Vesuvius famously erupted anddestroyed both Herculaneum and Pompeii.82

78On the standard musical markers of the extended MiddleEast, see Frits Noske, French Song from Berlioz to Duparc:TheOrigin andDevelopment of theMélodie, rev. Rita Bentonand Frits Noske, trans. Rita Benton (New York: Dover, 1970),312–14; and Jean-Pierre Bartoli, “L’Orientalisme dans lamusique française du XIXe siècle: La Ponctuation, la secondeaugmentée et l’apparition de la modalité dans les procéduresexotiques,”Revue belge demusicologie 51 (1997): 137–70.79Further, see Part 2 of this article.80Two other important “early saint” operas derive, howeverfreely, from Pierre Corneille’s tragedy Polyeucte (1642):Donizetti’s Les Martyrs (Opéra, 1840; based on his Poliuto,first performed posthumously: 1848) and Gounod’sPolyeucte (Opéra, 1878). Yet another important instance,by Debussy, comes from after my end-date of 1900 and isnot an opera: Le Martyre de saint Sébastien (Théâtre du

Châtelet, 1911), using a luxuriantly exoticized spoken andsung text (in French) by Gabriele d’Annunzio. See my“Unacknowledged Exoticism in Debussy: The IncidentalMusic for Le Martyre de saint Sébastien (1911),” MusicalQuarterly 90 (2007): 371–415.81On the portrayal of Jerusalem and the court of Herod inHérodiade (including descriptive details borrowed fromFlaubert’s 1877 novella Hérodias), see Tommaso Sabbatini,“Jerusalem, Machaerus, Carthage: Massenet’s Hérodiadeand Flaubert’s Orient,” in Massenet and the MediterraneanWorld, ed. Simone Ciolfi (Bologna: Ut Orpheus Edizioni,2015), 85–100.82The world-premiere recording and an accompanyingsmall book appeared in the “Opéra français” series producedby the Centre de musique romantique française (Edicionessingulares ES1020). See my review in American RecordGuide 79:1 (2016): 92–95; updated, lightly expanded, andposted (with Internet links) at: http://www.operatoday.com/content/2016/03/felicien_david_.php.


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http://www.operatoday.com/content/2016/03/felicien_david_.php

Here the representative of Roman power isfemale—Queen Olympia—and she is drawn to arecent and not very committed convert toChristianity, the Greek prince Hélios. Exoticismfunctions in multiple ways in this fascinatingwork. The queen is herself from “the East”(apparently Mesopotamia). This helps make hera plausible sexual predator, like Dalila in theopera that Saint-Saëns began writing aroundthe same time but did not reach performanceuntil 1877. The ascetic (indeed, celibate) earlyChristians—the steadfast Lilia, plus the piouschorus whose prayer scene opens act II—areshown as living austerely in a deserted locale farfrom the palaces of Herculaneum. Their determi-nation amid the hardships of life in this forbid-ding region cause them to resemble the devoutMuslims who trudge by caravan in David’s LeDésert and, in Bizet’sCarmen, the Gypsy banditswho negotiate the treacherous mountainside inthe opening of act III. These followers of thenew sect have no use for the pompous palacesand self-indulgent lifestyle of the glittering cityof Herculaneum—excesses that their spiritualleader, Magnus, denounces and that will leadto the city’s destruction in the opera’s finalmoments.

Massenet’s Thaïs (Opéra, 1894, rev. 1898)uses music and dancing to identify fourth-cen-tury Egyptians with the nineteenth-centuryinhabitants of the Middle East. For example, atthe end of act I, Thaïs engages in a sexually invit-ing pantomime.83 And, in act II, an onstageperformer known only as “La charmeuse” offersa come-hither entertainment uniting supplebodily movements and a curvaceous wordlessvocal line—all of this redolent of North Africanentertainments familiar to French people whohad traveled to North Africa or had attendedthe Paris world’s fairs of 1878 or 1889.84

In addition, one must at least mention a workthat would require extensive discussion for itsmultiple exotic locales. Halévy’s Le Juif errant(The Wandering Jew; Opéra, 1852) deals primar-ily with a Christian world of the distant past.

The title figure is a mythical character,Ashvérus (first mentioned in thirteenth-centurywritings), who supposedly taunted Christ as thelatter was led to his crucifixion, and thereafterwas doomed to wander the world like a latter-day Cain or the title character in Wagner’srecent Der fliegende Holländer (Dresden, 1843).The five-act work, staged and costumed in anextraordinarily luxurious manner, containsscenes that are set in the twelfth century CEand move their way progressively eastwardand southward: from Antwerp in the westernpart of the Holy Roman Empire to Bulgaria atthe foot of Mt. Hemos, to a broad public squarein Thessaloniki, to Constantinople (today’sIstanbul) during the era of the Crusade (ca.1190), and to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. In thatfinal location, the Last Judgment is enacted,complete with the Exterminating Angelsounding the famous trumpet call. The soulsof the damned are set apart from those of theblessed, and all are sent to their respectiverewards, after which the Wandering Jew, whohas been asleep on the sand, awakes, realizeshe has been dreaming, and marches wearilyonward. Halévy’s opera was a great success atfirst, providing ripe material for piano arrange-ments and the like. But, unlike his La Juive, itfell quickly into operatic oblivion. Le Juiferrant surely deserves at least a decent world-premiere recording, or maybe a semi-stagedconcert version allowing the audience to pro-vide the extraordinary, and often highly exoti-cized, visuals in their imagination.85

THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS AND

A FANTASTICAL MIDDLE EAST

The Arab world itself, long little known toEuropeans, was quickly thrust into publicawareness when Antoine Galland publishedLes Mille et Une Nuits (1704–17), a free adapta-tion of the famous “Arabian Nights” tales thathad circulated in the Arab world for centuriesin manuscripts of varying length and reliability.(Galland even added some stories that had been

83A powerful moment, to be discussed in Part 2 of thisarticle.84See Annegret Fauser,Musical Encounters at the 1889 ParisWorld’s Fair (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press,2005).

85Further, see Hallman, “Présence,” 973–74. A bit earlier(1847), Liszt had composed an extended song entitled LeJuif errant (S. 300/LW N40).

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told to him by Hanna Diab, a well-traveledMaronite Christian man from Aleppo, for whichGalland’s publication provides the earliestknown versions. These Arabian Nights taleswere quickly translated into numerous otherlanguages, and they also spawned new taleswritten in a similar manner, e.g., Les Mille etUn Jours (1710–12). The fascination with thecharacters and plot devices in these stories spil-led over into a number of eighteenth-centurycomic or semi-comic operas (e.g., by Gluckand Grétry). The trend continued into thenineteenth century, producing such notableinstances as Boieldieu’s Le Calife de Bagdad(Opéra-Comique, 1800), Isouard’s Aladin, ouLa Lampe merveilleuse (“féerie-musicale”;Opéra, 1822; completed by A. M. Benincori);Cherubini’s Ali-Baba, ou Les Quarante Voleurs(Opéra, 1833), Chabrier’s L’Étoile (Bouffes-Parisiens, 1877), and Reyer’s La Statue (Théâtre-Lyrique, 1861).

Boieldieu’s Le Calife contains a harem scenein which local and foreign women vie to becomethe caliph’s favorite. Here the servant Késiesings (and perhaps dances) a bolero with guitar-like pizzicato accompaniment from the stringsin the orchestra as well as a village-like (drone-laden) German Ländler and a minor-modeScottish lament, all in order to support her claimthat she can match the charms of women fromother countries.86

Somewhat similar in fairy-tale feeling isFélicien David’s tuneful and engagingly scoredLalla-Roukh (Opéra-Comique, 1862), based ona book by the Irish poet Thomas Moore about abeautiful Mughal princess from Kashmir whomust travel to Samarkand (in what is nowUzbekistan) to marry, against her will, the kingof that land. Numerous musical numbers inLalla-Roukh praise the beautiful surroundingsthat the anxious heroine and her retinue encoun-ter as they move along their otherwise grimroute. Early in act I the chorus (Lalla-Roukh’sservants) is given a gentle, folklike song to thewords “C’est ici le pays des roses, / . . . Sous cette

ombre on peut s’abriter” (“This is the land ofroses. . . . Beneath this shade we can take shel-ter”). The charming number is stated twice—first by themen, later by everyone who has gath-ered on stage—and creates a sense of “the East”as a fantastical wonderland, more lovely thananything one could find in a Western town orcity.

THE MIDDLE EAST IN MORE RECENT

HISTORICAL ERAS

A small number of “extended Middle East” ope-ras are set only a few centuries earlier than thecomposer’s and audience’s present day. Two ofthese deal with political tensions within a popu-lation understood as Eastern and Other. Catel’sLes Bayadères (Opéra, 1810) relates the losingstruggle that Démaly, a rajah of Benares (i.e.,Varanasi, again in northern India), wages againstMaratha insurgents.87 The Mughal Empire,which the Maratha confederacy would in factdefeat in 1674, was Islamic in religion. But theopera makes no reference to Islam. Indeed,Démaly and his court are clearly Hindu, sincethe officials include a Chief Brahmin and wehear numerous references to Vishnu, Durga,and other “dieux.” The opera was apparentlymeant to praise Napoleon and therefore treatsthe rajah as a completely admirable figure whosestrategic errors arise only from his having beenmisled by some of his advisors. The heroicLaméa, a chaste temple dancer, disarms theMarathas by performing before them with herfellow danseuses and getting them drunk. Thisepisode echoes the patriotic and divinely ordai-ned murders committed by two biblical women:Jael and Judith.88 The resemblance must have

86See Miriam K. Whaples, “Early Exoticism Revisited,” inBellman, Exotic, 3–25, 307–13; James Parakilas, “HowSpain Got a Soul,” in Bellman, Exotic, 137–93, 333–42 (here143); and Locke, “Cutthroats,” 25.

87See the recording and book of essays, published in 2014by the Centre de musique romantique française at thePalazzetto Bru Zane (Ediciones singulares, ES1016). Myreview appeared in American Record Guide 81:6 (2018):74–75. Démaly does not seem to be identifiable with anyone Indian monarch.88The title character in Halévy’s aforementioned Jaguarital’Indienne (see n. 48), likewise subdues her fellow tribesmenwith drink. She thereby stops them from attacking theDutch settlers. A comparable plot-constellation occurs ina work set on the shores of the Caspian Sea, LouisBourgault-Ducoudray’s Thamara, except that the heroinefalls in love with the enemy leader (Opéra, 1891).


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helped audiences identify with Laméa, despiteher religion, foreign name and costume, and, per-haps, her makeup and hair.

After the women have disabled the enemy,Laméa frees Démaly from imprisonment, buthe, suffering from battle wounds, is now closeto death. Laméa, following Brahmin custom, pre-pares to commit satı (to join him on the funeralpyre when he dies), thus proving her devotionto him. Démaly asks her to marry him, and,miraculously, he returns to health. The work,full of fresh and interesting melodic ideas, har-monies, and orchestrational choices, was so suc-cessful—and so impressive and unique in staging—that it was brought back as the opera withwhich the new home of the Paris Opéra (SalleLepeletier) was inaugurated in 1821.

Somewhat similar, in that it relied on his-torical accounts (however distorted), wasCherubini’s Les Abencérages, ou L’Étendard deGrenade (Opéra, 1813). The work expands uponan anecdotal account of a struggle between twogroups of Arabs in late-fifteenth-century Spain,the Abencerrages and the Zegris, and theattempt, successful in the opera at least, of theformer to make peace with the Christians whowere attempting to complete their reconquestof the Iberian Peninsula.89 Massenet’s Le Cid(1885), based freely on Pierre Corneille’srenowned play (1636), likewise deals with a his-torical event: the battle between the Spanishwarrior Rodrigo, who would come to be knownas Le Cid, and the Moorish (i.e., Arab) forcesunder Boabdil. The second tableau (in act I)begins with a scene of rejoicing among theSpaniards after a momentary victory over theMoors, and tableau 6 (in act III) includes anorchestral “Moorish rhapsody” to help charac-terize the Moorish soldiers (and apparently theirwives and, perhaps, children) that the soldiersfrom Navarra and Castile have brought backfrom the recent combat. The stage direction pro-jects a certain enjoyment of the captives’misery:“A gauche sont accroupis des prisonniers, desprisonnières et des musiciens maures. Désordretrès pittoresque” (At left we see, squatting,Moorish prisoners—male and female—and

musicians; all arranged in a highly picturesquedisorder).90

During the rest of the century, serious operaswould rarely allow the possibility that a groupof Muslims could be peace-loving and concilia-tory. The trend was, instead, a return to a por-trayal of Muslims as implacably hostile toEuropeans, a stereotype that had been memora-bly incarnated in Osmin, the overseer of theestate of the (largely humane) pasha in Mozart’sAbduction from the Seraglio, 1782. In thisregard, distant memories of the Ottomans’ con-trol of southeastern Europe, culminating in thesieges of Vienna in 1529 and 1683, may havebeen reinforced by recent warfare betweenFrench and native fighters in North Africa: forexample, the resistance movement in Kabylia(ca. 1847–54) led by Bou Baghia and a femalewarrior, Lalla Fadhma N’Soumer.

This more negative portrayal already showsup in Rossini’s Le Siège de Corinthe (Opéra,1826; freely based on his Italian operaMaometto II, 1820). Le Siège de Corinthe in-cludes the most topical attempt in any Rossiniopera to harness the day’s headlines for theatri-cal effect. As so often in the history of opera, itdoes this indirectly, in order to skirt censorshipfrom church and government and condemna-tions from critics and influential theatergoers.The plot is set in the 1450s and involves animportant historical event: the lengthy attackon the Greek city of Corinth by the OttomanTurks under Sultan Mehmet II. But this was,for Parisian theatergoers, a transparent allegoryof the Ottomans’ current struggle to put downthe protracted Greek War of Independence(1821–29)—a conflict limned at the time on can-vas by Delacroix (The Massacres at Scio, 1824;Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi,1826) and in verse by Victor Hugo (“L’Enfant,”in Les Orientales, 1829).91

89Another opera involving the Abencerrages is ThéodoreDubois’s Aben-Hamet (Théâtre du Châtelet, 1884).

90In act II (tableau 3), Boabdil’s envoy arrives on horsebackand challenges the Spanish troops to new combat. The kingdismisses him “proudly,” and the envoy departs “with alast gesture of defiance.” The best-known portion of LeCid is the danced divertissement in act III (tableau 4), inwhich each region of Spain is represented by music suppos-edly typical of it (e.g., the spirited “Navarraise”).91Walton, Rossini, 108–53; Warren Roberts, Rossini and Post-Napoleonic Europe (Rochester: University of Rochester Press,2015), 184–85; Larry Wolff, Ottoman Power and Operatic

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In the course of the nineteenth century, alargely negative portrayal of Muslims becameso standard that Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore(Opéra, 1877) could casually characterize as vio-lent and “black” a battalion of soldiers thatcomes from an unnamedMuslim land. This idio-syncratic opera combines the “recent centuries”type with elements of the legendary: act III takesplace in Hindu heaven.92 As for the evil Muslimmarauders, they are treated casually, not evenappearing on stage; they end up dispersing intothe desert when challenged by the forces of good.The latter (King Alim and his court and army) areexplicitly Hindu, but, in context, may havesymbolized present-day Europe or even Francein particular.93

LAKMÉ AND BRITISH (OR IS IT FRENCH?)IMPERIALISM

Among (mostly) serious French operas, onlyone—Delibes’s Lakmé—was set in what audien-ces would call “today” in some part of theMuslim or Hindu world and nonetheless man-aged to became a standard part of the interna-tional repertory. As in David’s comic opera LaPerle du Brésil, the colonial power is a countryother than France; the opera is set in British-con-trolled India. Still, the work does contain someovert critique of the obtuseness of colonial offi-cers who find themselves in the midst of a for-eign society and of women from the homecountry who visit or even join the officers there.The scenes satirizing the English characters—part of a long French tradition of twitting theEnglish as insufferably “prosaic”—are largelycarried out in spoken dialogue.94 As a result,

these scenes are not familiar to many operalovers, even though they may know well a fewexcerpts (the act I soprano-mezzo duet: “Viens,Mallika . . . Sous le dôme épais”; the act I tenoraria: “Fantaisie aux divins mensonges”; and theact II soprano “Bell Song”).

Indian society is presented in a highly bifur-cated manner: female gentleness, male vicious-ness. Women characters are associated withcolorful flowers, exquisite jewelry, and diegeticsinging.95 The songs they perform are often gen-tle or slightly sad (“Viens, Mallika” and theintroduction and narrative portions of the “BellSong”). The male leaders and their followersare resentful and prone to violence.96 TheHindu priest Nilakantha sets out to assassinatethe English officer Gérald, who has stepped intothe priest’s secluded compound and fallen inlove with his daughter. Gérald ends up merelywounded. In the final act, while Lakmé is nurs-ing him back to health, the local men rise up inarms against the English overlords and their mil-itary enforcers.

If any similar uprising ever happened in aFrench opera set in, say, present-day Algeria,that work either never reached the stage or failedwith audiences and critics and soon vanished.Nobody, clearly, wanted to have their nosesrubbed in the realities of French imperialismwhile it was in the phase of its greatest expan-sion. If anything, Delibes ensures that we think,in the final act, not of the French in NorthAfrica, but of a directly comparable momentin a French exotic opera, Carmen, set in yetanother country, Spain. Gérald hears the tunefulfifes of the British military bandmarching to putdown the Hindu rebellion, and Lakmé realizes atthat moment that he will never be truly hers.

Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna tothe Age of Napoleon (Stanford: Stanford University Press,2016), 305–60.92Further on the “Heaven” act in Le Roi de Lahore, seePart 2.93Locke, Musical Exoticism, 178–80, 183, 196. The Arabconquerors of the Iberian Peninsula are portrayed as cruel—in their policies and also individually—in Gounod’s LeTribut de Zamora (Opéra, 1881); see my review of its firstcomplete recording: American Record Guide 82:1 (2019):100–02. Lightly revised and uploaded to TheArtsFuse:http://artsfuse.org/190776/opera-album-review-a-grand-opera-from-late-in-gounods-career-gets-its-first-recording-ever/.94“The parallel [i.e., contrast] with the prosaic civilizationof England transplanted smack onto Indian soil brings outmarvelously well the poetry of unchanging customs [in

India] that seem to be impervious to man and time”—frompart 3 of the anonymous multipart “Lettres sur l’Inde,”L’Illustration, 19 May 1849, p. 183, as quoted in Lacombe,Keys, 180.95See Gurminder Kaur Bhogal’s “Lakmé’s Echoing Jewels,”in The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long NineteenthCentury, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2012), 186–205.96One character forms a special case: Hadji, the male servantof Lakmé’s father Nilakantha, is totally devoted to Lakmé.The role is generally given to a thin- and often nasal-voicedcharacter tenor, the type known in the French operatic worldas a Trial, after Antoine Trial (1737–95).


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http://artsfuse.org/190776/opera-album-review-a-grand-opera-from-late-in-gounods-career-gets-its-first-recording-ever/

The musicodramatic situation is directly com-parable to the one in Carmen, act II, whereCarmen sings and dances (and plays the casta-nets, or, according to the original libretto, clickspieces of a broken plate together) for Don José,but he is suddenly distracted by the bugles ofhis regiment and announces to his exotic femmefatale that hemust get back to the barracks. Thebiggest difference is perhaps that Lakmé is atonce fatale and fragile.

The interrelationships among French exoticoperas will become even clearer when we lookin more detail in Part 2 at the typical plots, char-acter types (including fatal women and vulnera-ble men), and musical devices that were usedagain and again, yet often with fresh twists.

APPENDIX

FOUR GUIDES TO TERMINOLOGY AND

REPERTORY

1. Terminology. Some would prefer to call theworks studied here “exoticist” rather than“exotic” so as to make clear that they reflectwidely held assumptions that were prejudicial,distorted, and culturally self-serving. The mainpoint of such objections is that, for example,the character Carmen in Bizet’s opera is not aRom (Romany) woman but a nineteenth-centurycultural construction of a “Spanish Gypsy”woman; and that the style of her “Chansonbohème” (“Gypsy Song”) in act II is likewise anagreed-upon Parisian version of the music ofSpain or,more specifically, of the Roma (gitanos)there, rather than the actual thing. Calling theportrayal exoticist, rather than merely exotic,would, according to this line of thought, havethe advantage of emphasizing that an underlyingcultural ideology (an -ism) is being expressed inthe work. I understand this position and in largepart agree with it. Still, I prefer to use “exoticopera” and analogous phrases (e.g., “exoticstyles”), mainly because they have attainedwidecurrency and have built up a range of relevantassociations with specific repertory works.97

I should perhaps also make clear that my useof the phrase “exotic opera” is not meant toimply that such a work was or is somehowexotic within (i.e., foreign to) its French culturalcontext. Quite the contrary, an opera rich inimplications about exotic lands and peoples canoffer eloquent testimony to attitudes prevailingin France (and elsewhere) at the time and forgenerations to come.

As for the terms “Orientalism” and “theOrient,” I largely avoid them throughout thisarticle for many reasons, or else use them within(understood) quotation marks. For English speak-ers today, “Orient” has a special disadvantage:it often refers to East and Southeast Asia, as ifthey comprised a vast undifferentiated region.Furthermore, “Oriental” as an adjective or, worse,as a noun (“an Oriental”) has accumulated manynegative and highly stereotypical connotations.98

2. The special problems of light opera (comiqueand bouffe).Most of the operas discussed by scho-lars in relation to exoticism are relatively serious.Comic opera in France (as elsewhere) has oftenfocused on mundane daily life, e.g., tensions ina bourgeois household or between aristocratsand commoners. A nineteenth-century opéra-comique (such as by Auber) or, even more so, anopéra-bouffe (such as by Offenbach) could evokecurrent events and trends in French society in amanner that was either direct and pointed or indi-rect but quite transparent. Indeed, the light-hearted moments in Carmen and Lakmé (two ofthe six operasmentioned at the outset of this arti-cle) derive from those works’ being partly rootedin traditions of French comic opera. (Some text-books create a distinct category for such mixed-tone works: opéra-lyrique.) Writers on Frenchoperas have tended to neglect the lighter genres.As a result, I have made a point of taking suchworks into consideration, including particularly

97See Locke, Music and the Exotic, 17–26, 31–33 (and nn.44–45, p. 337), and 324–26 (“Afterword: A Helpfully

Troubling Term”); also Locke, “On Exoticism, Western ArtMusic, and the Words We Use,” Archiv fürMusikwissenschaft 69:4 (2012): 318–28.98Further, see the section of the present article on the“extended Middle East.” Some people from East andSoutheast Asia whom I know continue to use “Oriental” torefer, in a neutral manner, to their native region and culture,perhaps reflecting its longstanding use in British-based edu-cational systems and newspapers (e.g., in Hong Kong andSingapore).

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accomplished ones by Chabrier and Messager, inboth parts of this article.99

3. Reviving certain operas today. Some operasexist on the margins of the repertory but are per-formed from time to time. For example,Cherubini’s French opera Ali-Baba, ou LesQuarante Voleurs was performed at La Scalain 1963 (though in Italian) and, fortunately,was recorded. The singers included TeresaStich-Randall, Alfredo Kraus, and VladimiroGanzarolli.100 In September 2018, the work re-turned to La Scala, with an international group ofyoung professional singers under the stage direc-tion of Liliana Cavani.101

Many works mentioned here, whether wellknown or forgotten, can be heard, in excerpts orin full, through YouTube, Naxos Music Library,Spotify, and other online services. The listenershould be wary, though: a given recording mayeliminate most or all spoken dialogue (a crucialcomponent in many examples of opéra-comique,opéra-lyrique, andopéra-bouffe),or itmayreassigna role to a different voice type. For example, thetrouser role of the handsome young peddlerLazuli in Chabrier’s L’Étoile, written for a mezzo-soprano en travesti, is sometimes now—withouthistorical justification—sung by a tenor.102

4. Specific theaters, and spoken vs. sung dia-logue. Because the question of spoken dialoguevs. recitative is so basic to French opera in thenineteenth century, I include, at the first signifi-cant mention of an opera, the name of thetheater at which it was first performed, as wellas the year of its premiere there. Works men-tioned here as having been first performed at

the Opéra-Comique or the Bouffes-Parisiens allused spoken dialogue.

I should perhaps also warn that in some casesknowing the name of the theater is not enough.For example, at the Théâtre-Lyrique, certainworks used spoken dialogue and others did not.Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de perles is entirely sung,even the passages that are most like free, plot-advancing discussions between two charactersbefore a formal number begins. The originallibretto used brief spoken exchanges at somecrucial junctures, but Bizet reworkedthem as recitatives.

Abstract.Nineteenth-century French opera is renowned for itsobsession with “the exotic”—that is, with lands andpeoples either located far away from “us” WesternEuropeans or understood as being very different fromus. One example: hyper-passionate Spaniards and“Gypsies” in Bizet’s Carmen. Most discussions ofthe role that the exotic plays in nineteenth-centuryFrench opera focus on a few standard-repertory works(mainly serious in nature), rather than looking at awider range of significant works performed at the timein various theaters, including the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, and Offenbach’s Bouffes-Parisiens.

The present article attempts to survey the repertorybroadly. Part 1 examines various “different” (or Other)lands and peoples frequently represented on stage inFrench operas. Part 2 discusses typical plots and char-acter types found in these operas (sometimes regard-less of the particular exotic land that was chosen) andconcludes by exploring the musical means that wereoften employed to impel the drama and to conveythe specific qualities of the people or ethnic groupbeing represented. Thesemusical means could includespecial or unusual traits: either all-purpose style mar-kers of the exotic generally or more specific style mar-kers associated with identifiable peoples or regions.But the musical means could also include any of therich fund of devices that opera composers normallyused when creating drama and defining character:melodic, harmonic, structural, and so on. This lastpoint is often neglected or misunderstood in discus-sions of “the exotic in music,” which tend instead tofocus primarily on elements that indisputably “pointto” (as if semiotically) the specific land or people thatthe work is seeking to evoke or represent.

In both Parts 1 and 2, instances are chosen fromworks that were often quite successfully performed atthe time in French-speaking regions and that, even iflittle known today, can at least be consulted throughrecordingsorvideos.Theworkscomefromthestandard

99Still, the question of how “the exotic” and French colo-nialism are reflected specifically in the comic operatic gen-res deserves separate treatment, more extended than whatis possible here.100The 1963 recording, conducted by Nino Sanzogno, is onNuova Era 2361/62 (2 CDs.)101See Renato Verga’s informative review at Bachtrack.com:https://bachtrack.com/review-cherubini-ali-baba-academy-scala-milan-september-2018.102The unauthorized tenor option was adopted in D.-J.Inghelbrecht’s radio-broadcast recording from 1957. The castmembers use a savvily rewritten version of the spoken dia-logue and deliver it with variety and verve. The conductingand singing are likewise witty and elegant. A 2016 CoventGarden production was reworked in more extreme fashion:two added characters, speaking in English, engage in annoy-ing banter about the plot.


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https://bachtrack.com/review-cherubini-ali-baba-academy-scala-milan-september-2018

https://bachtrack.com/review-cherubini-ali-baba-academy-scala-milan-september-2018

recognized operatic genres: five-act grands opéras,three-act opéras-comiques, and short works in bouffestyle. The composers involved include (among others)Adam, Auber, Berlioz, Bizet, Chabrier, Cherubini,Clapisson, Félicien David, Delibes, Flotow, Gomis,Gounod, Halévy, Messager, Meyerbeer, HippolyteMonpou, Offenbach, Ernest Reyer, Saint-Saëns,Ambroise Thomas, and Verdi (Les vêpres siciliennes,DonCarlos).

Examining certain lesser-known works revealsmerits that have gone relatively unheralded. As forthe better-known works, approaching them in thiswide-angledway grants us a richer appreciation of theirstrengths and their often-enlivening internal contradic-tions.Keywords: exoticism, imperialism, Orientalism, localcolor, opera, France (nineteenth century), colonialism,libretto, staging, sets, costumes

IN OUR NEXT ISSUE (SPRING 2022)

RALPH P. LOCKE: The Exotic in Nineteenth-Century French Opera,Part 2: Plots and Musical Devices

HAMISH ROBB: Marie Jaëll: Pioneer of Musical EmbodimentStudies

DYLAN PRINCIPI: Critiquing Music’s Ineffability from thePerspective of Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful”

19THCENTURYMUSIC

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