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<jats:p>Nineteenth-century French opera is renowned for its obsession with “the exotic”—that is, with lands and peoples either located far away from “us” Western Europeans or understood as being very different from us. One example: hyper-passionate Spaniards and “Gypsies” in Bizet’s Carmen. Most discussions of the role that the exotic plays in nineteenth-century French opera focus on a few standard-repertory works (mainly serious in nature), rather than looking at a wider range of significant works performed at the time in various theaters, including the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, and Offenbach’s Bouffes-Parisiens.</jats:p> <jats:p>The present article attempts to survey the repertory broadly. Part 1 examines various “different” (or Other) lands and peoples frequently represented on stage in French operas. Part 2 discusses typical plots and character types found in these operas (sometimes regardless of the particular exotic land that was chosen) and concludes by exploring the musical means that were often employed to impel the drama and to convey the specific qualities of the people or ethnic group being represented. These musical means could include special or unusual traits: either all-purpose style markers of the exotic generally or more specific style markers associated with identifiable peoples or regions. But the musical means could also include any of the rich fund of devices that opera composers normally used when creating drama and defining character: melodic, harmonic, structural, and so on. This last point is often neglected or misunderstood in discussions of “the exotic in music,” which tend instead to focus primarily on elements that indisputably “point to” (as if semiotically) the specific land or people that the work is seeking to evoke or represent.</jats:p> <jats:p>In both Parts 1 and 2, instances are chosen from works that were often quite successfully performed at the time in French-speaking regions and that, even if little known today, can at least be consulted through recordings or videos. The works come from the standard recognized operatic genres: five-act grands opéras, three-act opéras-comiques, and short works in bouffe style. The composers involved include (among others) Adam, Auber, Berlioz, Bizet, Chabrier, Cherubini, Clapisson, Félicien David, Delibes, Flotow, Gomis, Gounod, Halévy, Messager, Meyerbeer, Hippolyte Monpou, Offenbach, Ernest Reyer, Saint-Saëns, Ambroise Thomas, and Verdi (Les vêpres siciliennes, Don Carlos).</jats:p> <jats:p>Examining certain lesser-known works reveals merits that have gone relatively unheralded. As for the better-known works, approaching them in this wide-angled way grants us a richer appreciation of their strengths and their often-enlivening internal contradictions.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article considers the 1830 London premiere of Bellini’s Il pirata as virtual tourism. Musicologists, singers, and critics have long acknowledged opera’s power to transport listeners into other worlds, but there has been no sustained critique of opera as a mediation of tourist experience. Here I confront opera’s impulse to virtual tourism through a reading of Bellini’s Il pirata, its opening shipwreck, and its Byronic source history. I also examine the opera’s staging within the context of other technology-driven entertainments of the early nineteenth century, such as panoramas and aquadramas. Like other contemporary spectacles, operas were judged by how well they transported audiences elsewhere.</jats:p> <jats:p>William Grieve’s extravagant stage designs dazzled audiences, especially the opening shipwreck of Gualtiero, the opera’s Byronic hero. This simulated shipwreck connected several British obsessions, including the ocean as a symbol of the sublime, the rise of the shipwreck as a site for disaster tourism, and the hero’s status as a suffering traveler—all areas of Romantic culture that entangled intensity and immersion, literal and aesthetic transports, and tourist and theatrical modes of consciousness. British critics treated Bellini’s Il pirata not as literature, but as a mediation of tourist experience, and in so doing, they activated a range of contemporary anxieties about the traveler’s aesthetic authority against the rising tides of mass tourism and popular taste.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Years before Montmartre’s cabarets artistiques took Europe by storm, the Cabaret Paul Niquet thrived as a Right-Bank tavern popular among Paris’s laborers, vendors, and criminals during the early nineteenth century. It became notorious not only for its clientele, but also for its vivid representations in travel literature, fiction, popular song, and vaudeville. Even after its demolition by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire, the cabaret remained a fixation among Paris’s musical and literary class. The interest in this lowly tavern reveals a sustained middle-class preoccupation with the spatial and sonic practices of the most destitute of Parisian citizens. Yet this preoccupation was not merely a condescending fascination with the poor. Niquet’s cabaret serves as a lens through which to examine social and sensory changes brought on by urbanization. Bringing urban geography into conversation with the historiography of French theater, this article contends that the city’s proletarian leisure spaces offered a relational form of sociability that was at odds with the spectacular aesthetic of Haussmannization. The sounds emanating from Niquet’s cabaret, from clanging glasses to spontaneous songs, defined the cabaret institution spatially: not merely in acoustic terms, but also as a democratized site of leisure for workers and literati alike.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Conventional histories of Russian opera mark Mikhail Glinka’s 1836 opera Zhizn’ za tsarya (A Life for the Tsar) as the point of origin for Russian nationalist opera that quickly burst into full bloom, yet by the middle of the century homegrown opera had fallen out of performance repertory in favor of Western European and particularly Italian imports. It was around this time that a group of amateur composers later known as the kuchka (the “Mighty Handful” or “Mighty Five”) re-ignited the debate around creating a uniquely Russian genre of opera; however, their efforts only obscured Russian opera’s European roots rather than establish a completely separate genre. Yet their critical campaign proved successful, and the idea of Russian opera as a uniquely nationalist genre remains especially prevalent. This article examines Aleksandr Dargomyzhsky’s Rusalka (1856), one of the earliest examples of this new type of Russian nationalist opera, and how it responds to the dominance of Italian opera in Russia during the mid-century by embedding Italian operatic conventions into the score itself. Rusalka also inaugurated the operatic trend of adapting literary works by Aleksandr Pushkin, the writer often cited as the father of Russian literature. This article illustrates how both Pushkin’s dramatic Rusalka and Dargomyzhsky’s operatic adaptation of it a generation later imitated Western European literary and theatrical conventions. Paradoxically, the ways in which Pushkin and Dargomyzhsky would conceal these Western parallelisms would later be hailed as markers of a uniquely “Russian” literary and operatic style in a critical campaign designed to erase Russia’s long history of artistic dialogue with the wider Continent.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Nineteenth-century French opera is renowned for its obsession with “the exotic”—that is, with lands and peoples either located far away from “us” Western Europeans or understood as being very different from us. One example: hyper-passionate Spaniards and “Gypsies” in Bizet’s Carmen. Most discussions of the role that the exotic plays in nineteenth-century French opera focus on a few standard-repertory works (mainly serious in nature), rather than looking at a wider range of significant works performed at the time in various theaters, e.g., the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, and Offenbach’s Bouffes-Parisiens.</jats:p> <jats:p>The present article attempts to survey the repertory broadly. Part 1 examines various “different” (or Other) lands and peoples frequently represented on stage in French operas. Part 2 discusses typical plots and character types found in these operas (sometimes regardless of the particular exotic land that was chosen) and concludes by exploring the musical means that were often employed to impel the drama and to convey the specific qualities of the people or ethnic group being represented (as a community—through chorus and authority figures—and through the feelings and actions of individual characters). These musical means could include special or unusual traits: either all-purpose style markers of the exotic generally (oddities, one might say) or more specific style markers associated with an identifiable people or region (e.g., tunes, rhythms, and other devices understood as signaling one particular region). But the musical means could also include any of the rich fund of devices that opera composers normally used when creating drama and defining character: melodic, harmonic, structural, and so on. This last point is often neglected or misunderstood in discussions of “the exotic in music,” which tend instead to focus primarily on elements that indisputably “point to” (as if semiotically) the specific land or people that the work is seeking to evoke or represent.</jats:p> <jats:p>In both Parts 1 and 2, instances are chosen from works that were often quite successfully performed at the time in French-speaking regions and that, even if little known today, can at least be consulted through recordings or videos. The works come from the standard recognized operatic genres: e.g., five-act grands opéras, three-act opéras-comiques, and short works in bouffe style. Composers whose works are mentioned, or discussed in some detail, include (among others) Adam, Auber, Berlioz, Bizet, Chabrier, Clapisson, Félicien David, Delibes, Flotow, Gomis, Gounod, Halévy, Messager, Meyerbeer, Hippolyte Monpou, Offenbach, Ernest Reyer, Saint-Saëns, Ambroise Thomas, and Verdi (Les vêpres siciliennes, Don Carlos).</jats:p> <jats:p>Examining certain lesser-known works reveals merits that have gone relatively unheralded. As for the better-known works, approaching them in this wide-angled way grants us a richer appreciation of their strengths and their often-enlivening internal contradictions.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Mapping out several interpretations of free play in Immanuel Kant’s Third Critique helps parse the argument that “music is ineffable.” Although the argument is an old one, recent scholarship by Carolyn Abbate, Michael Gallope, and others has helped the idea of music’s ineffability resurface in recent years as a special, dialectical property of music’s sonic presence that perpetually defers statements about music’s meaning. However, the polysemy that results from this deferral is anchored, by the claim that “music is ineffable,” in the ontology of a preconceived notion of what “music” is.</jats:p> <jats:p>Examining the conceptuality of free play in Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” helps shift the crux of music’s meaningful plurality away from the ontology of “music” to language—which delimits aesthetic experience as “music” and makes it available for contemplation. The ineffabilist arguments that musical experience precludes or overwhelms language accord with the interpretations of free play that Paul Guyer has called “precognitive” and “multicognitive.” In contrast, Guyer proposes his own “metacognitive” interpretation, which requires an aesthetic stimulus to be grasped with a concept before any cognition can take place. By linking the beautiful to both the subjectively agreeable and the objectively good, Kant’s “Analytic” endows every person with the capacity to experience beauty individually. As a result, the judgment of something as beautiful depends, not on universal criteria, but on a “sense in common” (Gemeinsinn), which Gilles Deleuze described as knowledge’s precondition of communicability. Kant’s principle of common sense is what empowers discourse to communicate a shared idea of beauty by continually brokering agreement among a diversity of personal ideals. The insight that knowledge of an aesthetic experience is always framed with a concept, whose meaning is only ever tentatively agreed upon, preserves and democratizes the meaningfulness of “music” by attaching it to an idea admitting of many ideals, free from ineffability’s strong ontological claim.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Although hardly mentioned in English-language music scholarship today, the French musician Marie (Trautmann) Jaëll (1846–1925) was a pioneer of musical embodiment studies. Jaëll’s conception of both performing and listening unites body and mind: she shows musical expression and meaning to be inextricably connected to thought, inner hearing, movement, tension, and touch. Her theory—which is supported by recent research in music theory, pedagogy, and psychology—is the most comprehensive early model of musical embodiment.</jats:p> <jats:p>Jaëll’s theoretical framework rests on a concept of an elastic, dynamic consciousness. How we think and move around the piano—and how we think and move through “musical space”—greatly affects not just the actual sound produced but also the sound we believe we hear. Particular bodily attitudes, and the thinking that underlies them, encourage particular ways of hearing for both performer and listener. Thoughts and movements nurture an inner music more ideal than either the notes on the score or the real sound made by the instrument.</jats:p> <jats:p>Despite suffering greatly from the gender bias of her time, Jaëll presents a theory that forces us to accord her a pivotal place in the history of embodiment studies. Her theory demonstrates music to be a dynamic act that we understand through our own bodies and senses.</jats:p>