Room 3 - Imagi(ni)ng the Prose Epic

Summary

Le Spectacle est un mensonge; il s’agit de le rapprocher de la plus grande vérité: le Spectacle est un tableau.

[The theater is a lie; it is a matter of bringing it as close as possible to the greatest truth: the Theater is a painting.]

—Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Du Théâtre

Our museum so far has exhibited tragic opera alongside its closest literary collaborators. With good reason: Télémacomania was first and foremost a controversy stirred by words and fueled by pamphlets and letters. The novel's galvanizing energy, however, was by no means limited to the Enlightenment's frenzied debates about literary poetics and tragic reform. Quite the contrary: Télémaque immediately penetrated the visual arts and became popular on the operatic stage for several reasons. In the first place, Fénelon's prose famously conjured up spectacular Mediterranean topographies as the backdrop for sensual encounters between the novel's protagonist and his many temptresses. These images begged to be animated in a visual medium, and painters and dramaturgs could not resist the invitation to render these scenes in the two- and three-dimensional spaces of the canvas and the stage. Secondly, the novel's epic features offered composers and librettists a source text ideally suited to the epic-tragic reform genre synthesizing French tragédie lyrique and Italian dramma per musica, mythological and historical narratives, the spectacle of le merveilleux and neoclassical Aristotelian design.

In our first exhibit, we became involved in the scandal that began with Télémaque but almost immediately spun off into broader debates surrounding prose poetry. In this second exhibit, we first return to Télémaque in order to explore Fénelon's unsettled relationship with the pictorial qualities of his epic genre, specifically the value of animating non-Christian narratives in vivid detail. We will then view a collection of Télémaque-inspired canvases before turning our attention to Idomeneo, a piece whose powerful visual scenography captures and intensifies Fénelon's political turbulence through opera's full arsenal of effects. As we will discover, Idomeneo's reformist features build on a century of literary debate and operatic experimentation but also absorb a thriving visual culture inspired by Fénelon's modern prose.