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‘Le théâtre ne change qu'à la troisième scène’: the hand of the author and unity of place in Act V of Hippolyte et Aricie

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Geoffrey Burgess
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In the original version of the libretto of Hippolyte et Aricie, the librettist Simon-Joseph Pellegrin prefaced Act V with the rubric ‘le théatre ne change qu'à la troisiéme scéne’ [‘the stage changes only at the third scene’]. This is one of the few acts in the entire repertoire of tragédies en musique where the conventional formula ‘le théatre représente …’ [‘the stage represents … ’], followed by a description of what the stage was intended to depict, was not used. The annotation in Hippolyte warned audiences that, instead of the change of scenery that would normally occur during the entr'acte, the first two scenes of Act V retained the setting of Act IV (‘a wood by the sea, consecrated to Diana’), and the new décor (‘a delightful garden comprising the avenues of the Forest of Aricie’) was revealed only in the third scene. The sense of discontinuity at this ‘internal’ scenery change was also heightened by a break of liaison de presence (that is, none of the actors in scene 2 remained on stage for scene 3). A dispute arose over this breach of convention, and resulted in the first two scenes being omitted from performances sometime during the opera's first season in 1733, ostensibly to avoid the breach of unity of place caused by the change of scenery. This was not the only revision made to the opera in that season, but it was arguably the most significant.

Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , November 1998 , pp. 275 - 287
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

1 I use the term ‘internal’ to refer to changes of scenery that occur within a single act, as opposed to entr'actes which are ‘external’ to the acts.Google Scholar

2 In addition to numerous cuts made in the recitative and substitutions of airs, the other notorious revision was the reorganisation of Act III. Instead of the divertissement taking place between the scene where, on his return from Hades, Thésée discovers his wife and son together, and his monologue in which he resolves to punish his son, it was placed after the monologue. It has usually been claimed that the original organisation, although unconventional, made Thésée appear less rash by giving him time to deliberate on his decision to punish Hippolyte, and that by switching the components the authors created a configuration more acceptable to audience expectation. However there is no shortage of precedents for the original organisation in earlier tragédies en musique.Google Scholar

3 (October 1733), 2246. It is not possible to establish exactly when during the first season these two scenes were first suppressed, although it must have occurred before the Mercure article was written. The engraved score was probably prepared sometime between the granting of the privilàge on 19 September 1733 and opening night on 1 October 1733. Sometime later, a supplement of ‘Changemens conformes à la Réprésentation [sic]’ including both errata and the revisions made in the performances, was appended to the score. This source includes an indication that these two scenes were omitted from the performances. The original version of Act V appears in the first edition of the libretto, prepared between 26 September 1733 (the date of approbation) and the première just five days later. A second (undated) edition of the libretto was printed, in which the scenes were deleted, and Neptune was also removed from the dramatis persona. However, the other versions found in Rameau's supplement are not all registered.Google Scholar

4 The terms connoisseur, sçavan and peuple are taken from Viéville, Le Cerf de La, Comparaison de la Musique Italienne et de la Musique Françoise (Brussels, 1705, rpt. Geneva, 1972), II, 320ff. Le Cerf's definition of peuple (‘the multitude, the majority, which is not instructed in the specialists' rules, and which has only natural sentiment to guide its judgement’ II, 320) overlaps with what other writers referred to as the parterre, i.e. those who bought the lowest-priced tickets and stood on the ground floor of the auditorium.Google Scholar

5 Letter dated 26 October 1695. Lettres sur l'opéra à l'abbé Dubos suivies de Description de la Vie et Mœurs de l'Exercice et l'État des Filles de l'Opéra, ed. Gorce, J. de La (Paris, 1993), 57.Google Scholar

6 Réflexions critiques sur la poésie & sur la peinture, 7th edn (Paris, 1770), II, 347,Google Scholar as quoted in Murray, Timothy, Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in Seventeenth-Century England and France (Oxford, 1987), 171.Google Scholar

7 Lully established the convention of taking a dance from the immediately preceding act for each entr'acte, but in cases such as this where the previous act provides no tonally or dramatically appropriate music for the entr'acte, composers often took music from earlier acts. Hence, apart from a small number of instances where composers wrote special music, entr'actes always involve musical recollection. Although the practice of reaching back to an earlier act for entr'acte music may have been motivated in most instances by musica1 considerations, the possibility of dramatic significance — intended or consequential — should not be dismissed. Lois Rosow has argued for similar dramatic interpretation of entr'actes in operas by Lully, in ’Making connections: thoughts on Lully's entr'actes’, Early Music, 21 (1993), 231–8.Google Scholar

8 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, Œuvres completes, VI, ed. Malherbe, Charles (Paris, 1900).Google Scholar

9 In the 1996 production by Les Arts Florissants, William Christie followed neither of these sequences exacdy. While retaining the first two scenes of Act V, he replaced the ‘Air des Matelots’ with an instrumental rendition of Phèdre's air ‘Cruelle mère des Amours’ (Act III scene 1) transposed down a third to G minor. This historically unprecedented substitution (I have failed to locate examples of vocal movements reworked as entr'actes) sustains die tragic tone of the end of Act IV, but is too close in style and emotional tone to the surrounding music to signal the structural and temporal break required at the juncture of the acts. Its nostalgic obsession with maternal guilt dissolves into the prélude to Thésée's monologue. Christie's substitution can also be read as an attempt to represent musically what happens between the acts — Phèdre's suicide. More than ten years after Hippolyte et Aricie Rameau adopted a similar strategy for representing action which, while part of the drama, remained invisible. For example, he composed a special bruit de guerre for the second version of Dardanus (1744) to depict a battle that occurs off stage during an entr'acte.Google Scholar

10 This text appears in the second edition of the 1733 version of the libretto. The text and music are printed in Malherbe's edition, Rameau Œuvres complètes, (see n. 8), VI, 457.Google Scholar

11 ’Rameau, Pellegrin and the Opéra: the revisions of “Hippolyte et Aricie” during its first season’, Musical Times, 124 (1983), 533–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 As Gabriel Bonnet de Mably commented: ‘the gods and magicians to which opera gives birth […] are powerful enough to change the appearance of places at their will, and Aristotle himself would not find it bad if Jupiter in Thétis [et Pelée] transforms the seashore into delightful gardens, and that, with a waive of her wand, Médée erects palaces, brings forth monsters and disrupts all nature.’ Lettres à Madame La Marquise de P … sur l'opéra (Paris 1741, rpt. New York, 1978), 37.Google Scholar

13 Unjustified internal changes do occur in operas after Hippolyte et Aricie. In the 1756 version of Zoroastre for instance (Louis de Cahusac and Rameau), between scenes 3 and 4 of Act II the setting suddenly shifts from the palace of Oromasés to the stronghold of the kings of Bactria. Oromasés sends Zoroastre to rescue Amélite; the spectators follow him on his quest, but they arrive before he does to witness Amélite being tortured by Erenice and her demons, and so, as in Hippolyte, there is no liaison de présence. The effect achieved by this scenery change is similar to cinematic montage techniques which, like the entr'actes in a tragédie en musique, disrupt dramatic continuity.Google Scholar

14 François Hédelin d'Aubignac, La Pratique du théâtre (Amsterdam, 1715, rpt. Munich, 1971), 36.Google Scholar

15 The two correspondents in Mably's fictitious dialogue agreed that, even though opera was a ‘fairyland’, librettists should still comply with unity of place. They found internal changes of scenery disagreeable and tiresome — even those in Lully's operas that were dramatically justified. Mably seems to have been particularly concerned with internal changes, and recommended that changes of locale should either be avoided within an act, or, where more than one place was required within the same act, that a single décor should be made to suffice (Lettres à Madame La Marquise de P … sur l'opéra [see n. 12], 22–3).Google Scholar

16 Henri Guichard explained in a preface to his libretto of Ulysse (1703, with music by Jean-Féry Rebel) that, being compelled to comply with the rule of unity of place, he located each act of the opera on the Island of Ithaca, even though some of the episodes refer to events that, according to the sources of the myth, took place on Circe's island. While the libretto calls for changes of scenery representing different parts of Ithaca, the librettist was careful to avoid transporting the drama between the two islands.Google Scholar

17 Alceste (IV, 1674), Psyché (IV, 1678), Proserpine (V, 1680) and Orphée (II, 1690). Other works included scenes at the gates of Hell or in subterranean caverns.Google Scholar

18 D'Aubignac condoned the mixture of vérité de l'action and représentation in the Prologue — an aspect of Greek drama suppressed in spoken tragedy of the Classical Age, but exploited in the tragédie en musique. A number of Prologues to earlier operas can be read as authorial statements relating to the poetic treatment of the drama that follows. This is particularly true of Atys (Quinault and Lully, 1676), which thematises the incorporation of pastoral and tragic elements, and a series of Prologues that represent disputes amongst the muses —Achile et Polixene (Campistron, Lully and Collasse, 1687), Jephté (Pellegrin, Montéclair, 1732) and Achille et Déidamie (Danchet, Campra, 1735). In these prologues the authorial voice is virtually conflated with vérité de l'action.Google Scholar

19 Amongst earlier works with similar narrative connections between these two parts of the work are Psyché (1678), Iphigénie (1704), Idomenée (1712), Telemaque et Calipso (1714).Google Scholar

20 Mercure de France (September 1742), 2077.Google Scholar

21 Ibid.

22 See ‘A diffident débutant? Rameau and the première of Hippolyte et Aricie’, in Hippolyte et Aricie, recording by du Louvre, Les Musiciens dir, Minkowski, Marc, Archiv. 445 853–2, 1995.Google Scholar

23 ‘Rameau, Pellegrin and the Opéra’ (see n. 11), and ‘A diffident débutant?’ (see n. 22).Google Scholar

24 ‘La Préface l'Hippolyte et Aricie ou la critique de Phèdre’, Hippolyte et Aricie, programme book prepared for performances at the Paris Opéra by Florissants, Les Arts (Paris, 1996), 67–74.Google Scholar

25 The myth of Castor and Pollux is a significant exception to this tradition, and has been read with homoerotic implications.Google Scholar

26 This subject is developed more fully in my dissertation, ‘Ritual in the Tragédie en musique from Lully's Cadmus (1673) to Rameau's Zoroastre (1749)’, PhD. diss., Cornell University (1998).Google Scholar

27 ‘Musicien dans un paysage de ruines’, Hippolyte et Aricie (see n. 24), 76.Google Scholar

28 In the main text of the libretto the dancers are described as ‘inhabitants of the Forest of Aricie’, but the list of performers calls them ‘shepherds and shepherdesses’ (see F-Po Liv.18[R38 (12) [1733] and Liv.18[R44 (7) [1744]). The only precedent for the inclusion of rustic characters in a ground bass dance is found in Orion (Joseph de Lafont, Pellegrin and Louis de La Coste, 1728), where shepherds dance a short ‘Air de Passacaille’.Google Scholar