Harris-Warrick, Rebecca: Ballroom scenes on the French operatic stage

Once the Paris Opera had begun expanding beyond mythological settings to contemporary ones, the staging of masked balls became a trope of the repertoire. Initially set in Venice, starting with “L’Italie” in Campra’s L’Europe galante (1697), masked balls were later depicted as taking place in French spaces—not just ballrooms, but in fairs set on the banks of the Seine. Ball scenes served several dramatic purposes. First, they enriched plotlines with scenes of deception and unmasking, often in the service of testing marital fidelity. Second, they allowed for an extended sequence of dancing that nonetheless conformed to fundamental French principles of dramatic verisimilitude. Third, they held up a mirror to French audiences, one that reflected an image of their own social practices back at them, although the mirror might be idealizing or distorted or both at the same time.
This talk will use ballroom scenes found in three early18th-century opera-ballets — Mouret’s Les Fêtes de Thalie (1714), Montéclair’s Les Fêtes de l’été (1716), and Campra’s Ballet des âges (1718) — as windows not only onto the dramatic purposes served by such scenes, but onto the music that set the dancers in motion and — to the extent that it can be recaptured — the choreography.

Rebecca Harris-Warrick, Ithaca, NY, USA:

Rebecca Harris-Warrick served as professor of music history at Cornell University (USA) until her retirement in 2021. Having been introduced to early dance as a graduate student at Stanford University, she gradually began including dance topics within her musicological research. Her book with Carol Marsh about Le Mariage de la grosse Cathos, the only complete theatrical work from the 17th or 18th century to survive with its music and choreography intact (Musical Theatre at the Court of Louis XIV, CUP, 1994) led her to investigate the way dance functions inside of French operas (Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera, CUP, 2016). This book includes an online appendix providing contextual information about all 47 of the choreographies by Pécour said in their titles to have been danced at the Paris Opéra. She has also prepared critical editions of ballets by Jean-Baptiste Lully and of an opera by Gaetano Donizetti.