AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

128 saturday morning AMS Philadelphia 2009
(such as planing soundboards, voicing, tuning, regulating, or painting), I show that these
young men and women located themselves outside the “mainstream” by reorienting their everyday
around the temporal discipline of slow, painstaking, historically-derived processes and
thwarting modernity’s temporalities of 24-hour clocks and accelerated productivity schedules.
Ultimately, I contend that the apprentices linked this type of labor to an ideology of “outsider
authenticity”—the authenticity of living and working outside the trajectories of technological
progress, professional advancement, middle class domesticity, and capital accumulation.
rePresentAtion in the thirD rePuBlic
Jane fulcher, university of Michigan, chair
DELIBES AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY TRADITIONS
Carlo Caballero
University of Colorado, Boulder
Although historians take Bizet’s Carmen as a turning point (or point of no return) in the
history of French opéra comique, this narrow focus has detracted from understanding Parisian
comic operas of the same period. The richness of Delibes’s Le roi l’a dit (1873, revived 1885)
stems precisely from its masterful exploitation of a century of accumulated conventions. If Bizet’s
work retains the normal framework of an opéra comique but explodes its aesthetic effect,
Delibes’s work treats the conventions of the genre so virtuosically as to make its historical and
political mechanisms manifest. The effect is one of “functional” or “bifocal” historicism, because
the formal and vocal conventions the work embraces had an unbroken history. Yet while
they remained modern at the Opéra-Comique, their manipulation in the piece highlights
their long-standing historical status. This landscape of continuities between the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, already subtle, is further charged by moments of archaism prompted
by the opera’s seventeenth-century plot.
Delibes had a particular aptitude for identifying with older styles and aesthetic values, not
only in Le roi l’a dit, but also in Sylvia (1876) and Le roi s’amuse (1882). Indeed, in his readiness
to adopt long-standing traditions and constraints of the theaters he worked for, Delibes (like
Auber and Adam) sometimes seems to operate as if he were an eighteenth-century composer.
This overall traditionalism has perhaps disguised those moments properly described as historicist,
where the evocation of past styles serves to underscore changed circumstances.
Le roi l’a dit takes the concept of “noblesse” in particular as an object of comic reversals
and commentary. Gondinet’s libretto unhinges nobility from its premises in birthright and
civilized character in order to allow it to shift location through the course of the plot. The
Marquis is of ancient family but cannot achieve distinction in any of the noble arts; Javotte,
a servant, has the social graces of a noblewoman; and the bumbling peasant Benoit wishes
for, acquires, and finally discards the mask of nobility. Such juggling with social categories is
deeply rooted in the traditions of comic opera. But Delibes treats the musical symbols of his
genre with peculiar precision in relation to such musical relics as the minuet (the score offers
no less than three of them) and gavotte, as well as the modern waltz. Delibes also exploits
the eighteenth-century hierarchy of musical meters with Mozartian acuteness, now working
from long tradition, now developing new possibilities (as when the stymied quartet marking
Benoit’s sudden and unjustified elevation to nobility is set in a lopsided 5/4). This quartet, a