Musical setting and scenic movement: chorus and chœur dansé in eighteenth-century Parisian Opéra

Abstract

With regard to scenic movement, the chorus in French Baroque opera was, for the most part, almost completely static. Yet from Lully on, French musical theatre had available the ‘chœur dansé’: a chorus number which incorporated both singing and dancing. The era of Lully and Rameau knew various forms of chœur dansé, in all of which scenic movement was realized through dance. Gluck’s Parisian reform operas of the 1770’s transformed this sort of number, since Gluck had the singers as well as the dancers move. The decisive change, however, came in the function of the musical setting, which underwent a paradigm shift. Whereas formerly only homophonic passages accompanied dancing, with polyphony serving as a surrogate for physical movement, now polyphony was actually associated with that movement.