The Peak Years of Grand Opera in ParisĪ significant early Grand Opera was La Muette de Portici (1828) by Auber, who was also a successful composer of opéra-comique. The sheer scale of these productions meant that few places apart from the Opéra could afford to stage them. The performance typically concluded with a dramatic final scene of massacre, shipwreck or even a volcanic eruption. A large cast of soloists was needed, and a chorus to provide the crowd scenes of battles or processions, while the huge orchestra was often further augmented by a stage band. The libretti, often by Eugene Scribe, had plots based on historical episodes of conspiracy, revolution or religious persecution. Most of this was developed by Louis Daguerre, the pioneer of photography, who worked at the Opéra for most of the 1820s and 1830s. Normally, it had elaborate sets, with lighting effects and stage machinery. To count as a Grand Opera, a work needed to have sung recitative (with no spoken dialogue), four or usually five acts, and a ballet. In the 1820s and 1830s, a distinctive genre developed at the Opéra. By the time it found a permanent home in the Palais Garnier in 1875, the great days of Grand Opera were past. The theatre in which these serious operas were performed was also known as the Opéra, but its location in Paris moved through a series of buildings through most of the 19th Century. However, it was usually simply known as the Opéra. The institution controlling serious opera in France began under Louis XIV as the Academie Royale de Musique, mutating into the Academie Imperiale, Academie Nationale and various other guises as the political scene changed. L'Opéra and Grand Opera L'Opéra: an Institution and a Building The political turmoil of the day was expressed in these works, whose best example is actually by the German composer Beethoven, Fidelio (1805). The Revolution also gave rise to the fairly short-lived genre of rescue opera, where the hero or heroine is rescued from prison or danger. Naturally, with the Revolution in 1789, this lighter style became the dominant form. Becoming increasingly popular as the 18th Century went by, these works had ordinary people as characters rather than kings and heroes. Opéra-comique was a lighter style which partly began as a reaction against the more formal tragédies-lyriques which had developed from Lully's style. These works had the serious tone of the Italian Opera seria, with the distinctive French features of dance and a large chorus, but castrati singers, so popular elsewhere in Europe, never found much favour in France. A distinct French style was developed in the 1670s by Lully, whose works of tragédies en musique set the dominant style for nearly a century. In the early 17th Century, some unsuccessful attempts were made to import Italian opera to the French court, but ballet remained much more popular. The 17th and 18th Centuries Early French Opera Opera in France after 1970 can be considered as part of the general international style, rather than as a separate genre. By the mid 20th Century the older French tradition had become fossilized, and was no longer renewed by important new works. After the middle of the century these strands grew closer until by 1900, a general form of French opera remained, with a new subsidiary in the form of Operetta. In the early 19th Century, two distinct strands of Grand Opera and Light Opera were present. Also, the French taste for centralised authority meant that opera, like many other facets of culture, was controlled by laws and was often entangled in bureaucratic regulations. The primacy of singers was never favoured as in Italy, and the French style always favoured a richer instrumental support, paying more attention to the words being sung than was found in the classic Italian style. Opera originated in Italy around 1600, but from an early stage its development took a distinctive path in France.
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