The Institutions of Opera in Paris from the July Revolution to the Dreyfus Affair

FAIN: RZ-50227-04

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC 27599-1350)
Annegret Fauser (Project Director: November 2003 to December 2006)

A conference focusing on the issue of how a range of Paris opera institutions functioned in French cultural life from 1828 until the end of the century.

The study of French opera is one of the cutting-edge topics in current musicological research. In the international symposium "The Institutions of Opera in Paris from the July Revolution to the Dreyfus Affair," both leading and promising younger scholars in the field of Opera Studies will come together to focus, for the first time, on the vital issue of "institution" with respect to French opera in the nineteenth century. The subsequent publication of the reworked papers (planned with Princeton University Press) will constitute a significant contribution to the study not only of opera in the nineteenth century but also French cultural life. The audience for both symposium and book will be graduate students and scholars in musicology, cultural studies, French studies, history and intellectual history. No other genre was more central to cultural life in nineteenth-century Paris than opera, and the opera house served as stage not only for the art works themselves but for France as a nation in all its complexities and contradictions. The intricate interfaces of institution, musical production and reception have been explored in studies of individual opera houses, selected repertoires or limited time periods. What is lacking, however, is any major attempt at creating the bigger picture of the intricacies of Parisian operatic life out of these individual puzzle pieces. The symposium and the subsequent book are the first major engagement with these issues on a larger scale both in North America and in Europe.