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The Opera and the Omnibus: Material Culture, Urbanism and Boieldieu's La dame blanche

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 November 2020

Nicole Vilkner Open the ORCID record for Nicole Vilkner [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

In the summer of 1828, the Entreprise générale des Dames Blanches launched a fleet of white omnibuses onto the streets of Paris. These public transportation vehicles were named and fashioned after Boieldieu's opéra comique La dame blanche (1825): their rear doors were decorated with scenes of Scotland, their flanks painted with gesturing opera characters, and their mechanical horns trumpeted fanfares through the streets. The omnibuses offered one of the first mass transportation systems in the world and were an innovation that transformed urban circulation. During their thirty years of circulation, the omnibuses also had a profound effect on the reception history of Boieldieu's opera. When the omnibuses improved the quality of working- and middle-class life, bourgeois Parisians applauded the vehicles’ egalitarian business model, and Boieldieu's opera became unexpectedly entwined in the populist rhetoric surrounding the omnibus. Viewing opera through the lens of the Dames Blanches, Parisians conflated the sounds of opera and street, as demonstrated by Charles Valentin Alkan's piano piece Les omnibus, Op. 2 (1829), which combines operatic idioms and horn calls. Through these examples and others, this study examines the complex ways that material culture affects the dissemination and reception of a musical work.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 90 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

Nicole Vilkner, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA; vilknern@duq.edu

An earlier version of this paper was awarded the 2016 Student Paper Prize by the Greater New York Chapter of the American Musicological Society. Research for this project was conducted at the archives of the Carriage Association of America (Lexington, KY).

References

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12 This dedication is printed in François-Adrien Boieldieu and Eugène Scribe, La dame blanche, opéra-comique en trois actes, représenté pour la première fois sur le Théâtre Royal de l'Opéra Comique, le 10 décembre 1825 (Paris, 1825).

13 Boieldieu refers to this performance in Adrien Boieldieu, ‘ Three autograph letters signed, 1820–1834’, Memorial Library of Music, number 108a. Charles X's gifts to Boieldieu are documented in Gabet, Charles, Dictionnaire des artistes de l’école française au XIXe siècle: peinture, sculpture, architecture, gravure, dessin, lithographie et composition musicale (Paris, 1831), 73–4Google Scholar.

14 Vincent Giroud briefly notes a connection between La dame blanche's plot and Bourbon politics in Giroud, French Opera: A Short History (New Haven, 2010), 118.

15 Charles X attempted to reinstate the laws of primogeniture, the practice of passing property to the eldest son. Though this bill was defeated in the Chamber of Deputies, the entitlements of property and wealth were paramount in establishing power in Bourbon France. See Beach, Vincent W., Charles X of France: His Life and Times (Boulder, 1971), 225Google Scholar.

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19 Pendle, Eugène Scribe and French Opera of the Nineteenth Century, 274.

20 Scottish-style fashion plates abounded during the early nineteenth century. See Rudolph Ackermann, ed., ‘Walking Dress’ (fashion plate 20), in The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics, series 1, vol. 12, no. 70 (October 1814), held at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, https://collections.lacma.org/node/247704. See also ‘Opera Dress’ (fashion plate), La belle assemblée or, Bell's Court and Fashionable Magazine Addressed Particularly to the Ladies 9 (1 March 1814), held at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, http://collections.lacma.org/node/252705.

21 Unknown, ‘Modes’, Le figaro 1/63 (19 March 1826), 4.

22 Font, ‘Five Scenes from a Romance, 115–32. The scenes from La dame blanche featured on the cotton prints included Act I scene 8, Act II scene 7, Act II scene 9 and Act III scene 14.

23 La dame blanche was not the first opera to inspire the textile industry: scenes from Grétry's La caravane du Caire (1783) received similar treatment in a fabric produced in Nantes. See Wolff, Larry, The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (Stanford, 2016), 212–14Google Scholar.

24 The wallpaper was printed by Jean Zuber et Cie in 1827. See Font, ‘Five Scenes from a Romance, 132. Also see David Charlton and Nicole Wild, Théâtre de l'Opéra-Comique Paris: Répertoire 1762–1927 (Sprimont, 2005), 206–7.

25 Lynn, Catherine, Wallpaper in America: From the Seventeenth Century to World War I (New York, 1980), 188Google Scholar.

26 On the appearance of the Dames Blanches carriages, see Guerrand, Roger-Henri, Mœurs Citadines: histoire de la culture urbaine, XIXe–XXè siècles (Paris, 1992), 119–22Google Scholar.

27 The fare for the Dames Blanches rose from 25 to 30 centimes in 1830, thereby standardising the omnibus fee. See Guerrand, Roger-Henri, ‘De l'omnibus à l'autobus’, L'histoire: Société d’éditions scientifiques 81 (1985), 130Google Scholar.

28 The history of these vehicles is a bit knotty. The Dames Blanches vehicles were first conceived by entrepreneur Stanislas Baudry who launched the inaugural line in Nantes in 1826. The Nantes operation was short-lived, however, as Baudry took his business concept to Paris in 1828 where he founded the Entreprise générale des omnibus (EGO), a line of black and white cabs that were not thematically linked to opera. In the same year, competitor Edme Fouquet founded the Entreprise générale des Dames Blanches in Paris, a fleet of opera-inspired vehicles that were presumably modelled after Baudry's original business in Nantes. Parisian officials granted permits for Baudry's business in May 1828 and to Fouquet's Dames Blanches line in June 1828. John Greenwood's horse bus company founded in 1824 is a notable precedent in Manchester, England. His vehicles held eight or nine passengers, as compared with the Parisian vehicles that accommodated twelve to twenty. See Papayanis, Nicholas, Horse-drawn Cabs in Paris: The Idea of Circulation and the Business of Public Transit (Baton Rouge, 1996), 59–67Google Scholar. On Greenwood's business, see Dennis, Richard, English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century: A Social Geography (Cambridge, 1984), 117CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 On fleet size, see Papayanis, Horse-drawn Cabs in Paris, 76. On route information, see [Louis-Marie Debelleyme], Ordonnance concernant le service des voitures de place, précédée d'une table des matières, suivie de l'itinéraire officiel de toutes les nouvelles voitures, publiée avec l'autorisation de M. le Préfet de police (Paris, 1829), 29.

30 The Opéra-Comique was at several different locations during the Dames Blanches’ circulation – the Salle Ventadour on the rue Neuve-Ventadour, the Salle de la Bourse and the second Salle Favart – houses that were all within walking distance of the omnibus route. On hours of operation, see Ulysse Tencé, ‘Paris. Statistique des Omnibus’, Annuaire historique universel pour 1835 (Paris, 1836), 175.

31 Although Les favorites seemingly correspond to Donizetti's opera by the same name, the omnibus line predates the opera by more than ten years. The inaugural routes of Les favorites are documented in Préfecture de la Seine, ‘Ordonnance concernant le service des voitures de place’ (Paris, July 1829), 4.

32 Papayanis, Horse-drawn Cabs in Paris, 67.

33 Papayanis, Horse-drawn Cabs in Paris, 78.

34 ‘Tout le monde passe par l'omnibus; fait l'histoire de l'omnibus, c'est faire l'histoire de la société.’ From Édouard Gourdon, Physiologie de l'omnibus (Paris, 1850), 95.

35 Between 1834 and 1867, the Opéra-Comique offered five, sometimes six, ticket-pricing tiers. See Huebner, Steven, ‘Opera Audiences in Paris, 1830–1870’, Music & Letters 70 (1989), 219CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On social implications of tiered seating in opera houses, see Weber, William, Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna between 1830 and 1848, 2nd edn (Aldershot, 2004), 27Google Scholar.

36 On the influence of the omnibus on society and culture, see Belenky, Masha, ‘From Transit to Transitoire: The Omnibus and Modernity’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 35 (2007), 408–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 ‘Il m'a dit que Dame blanche, ça voulait dire pour tout le monde!’ From Duflot and Roche, Le bal de l'avoué, comédie-vaudeville en deux actes, représenté, pour la première fois, sur le Théâtre des Variétés 16 avril 1830 (Paris, 1830), 6.

38 Nineteenth-century wages are surveyed in Rougerie, Jacques, ‘Remarques sur l'histoire des salaires à Paris au XIXe siècle’, Le mouvement social 63 (1968), 71–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 102–3.

39 Foville, Alfred de, La transformation des moyens de transport et ses conséquences économiques et sociales (Paris, 1880), 173Google Scholar. Also, Walton, William, Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day , vol. 6 (Paris, 1900), 287Google Scholar.

40 The Duchess of Berry's financial support for the Entreprise générale des Dames Blanches is documented in the Archives de la Préfecture de Police (D/A 192) in the notes of the 14, 20 and 24 August 1829. Referenced in Papayanis, Horse-drawn Cabs in Paris, 66, n. 52.

41 Maurice characterises the Dame Blanche as a ‘véhicule essentiellement plébéien’. From Charles Hugo, La bohème dorée (Paris, 1859), 237, for entire episode see 232–40.

42 ‘Toutes les femmes sont égales devant Dieu et tous les faubourgs devant l'omnibus.’ Hugo, La bohème dorée, 236.

43 For further discussion on omnibuses and bourgeois patronage, see Belenky, ‘From Transit to Transitoire, 411.

44 ‘Depuis la révolution opérée par les Omnibus, il se trouve constaté que cent mille personnes qui seraient restées à pied, profitent aujourd'hui de la douceur des voitures, signe certain, ajouté à beaucoup d'autres, de l'aisance progressive dans toutes les classes de la société.’ Tencé, ‘Paris. Statistique des Omnibus’, 175.

45 Soullier, Charles, Paris-neuf, ou, rêve et réalité (Paris, 1861), 155–60Google Scholar.

46 Gavarni, Paul, ‘Barricade in the rue St. Martin’, Illustrated London News 7 (4 March 1848), 131Google Scholar. Engraving.

47 Police records indicate that this location was along the Dames Blanches route. See Préfecture de police, ‘Ordonnance concernant le service des voitures de place, précédée d'une table des matières, suivie de l'itinéraire officiel de toutes les nouvelles voitures’ (Paris, 1829), 29–30.

48 The bourgeois reputation of the Opéra-Comique is discussed at length in Huebner, ‘Opera Audiences in Paris, 1830–1870’.

49 On street performers in Paris, see Scott, Derek B., Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris and Vienna (Oxford, 2008), 31–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Zucchi, John E., Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Paris, London, and New York (Montreal, 1992), esp. 42–75Google Scholar.

50 Performers on barrel organs and other instruments performed airs from La dame blanche, particularly ‘Ah! Quel plaisir d’être soldat’ and ‘Robin Adair’ the traditional Irish melody featured in the Act II ‘Scottish’ chorus. See Escudier, ‘Chronique Musicale’, La France musicale 6 (10 December 1843), 1. On the Parisian adoption of ‘Robin Adair’ in barrel organ culture, see Byerley, Thomas and Timbs, John, eds., ‘Why are not the English a Musical People?’, The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 12 (6 September 1828), 147Google Scholar.

51 ‘la chanson des rues était considérée comme le thermomètre de l'esprit public’. From H[enri] Genouillac, Gourdon de, Les refrains de la rue de 1830 à 1870 (Paris, 1879), 7–9Google Scholar.

52 ‘Malheur au compositeur auquel échoit l'honneur d'une telle popularité, du moment où son œuvre a passe dans la rue, on le repousse du salon. Malheur à lui, ai-je dit, s'il n'attache du prix qu’à l'opinion qui paie; mais s'il a de l'orgueil bien placé, si l'approbation gratuite de la masse lui est une récompense suffisant, il sera heureux; car sa musique, une fois adoptée par les orgues, deviendra populaire; elle sera dans toutes les bouches, elle le poursuivra partout dans le jour et dans la nuit.’ From Père [François-Joseph] Fétis, ‘De la musique des rues’, Revue musicale 9 (13 September 1835), 290.

53 The coaches of the EGO were also equipped with specialised horns. A description of the mechanism can be found in Camp, Maxime Du, ‘Les voitures publiques dans la ville de Paris: les fiacres et les omnibus’, Revue des deux mondes 2 (1867), 318–52Google Scholar. See also Bachelet, Théodore, Dictionnaire générale de biographie et d'histoire, vol. 2 (Paris, 1895), 2074Google Scholar.

54 Du Camp describes the horn calls as ‘fanfares lugubres’. See Du Camp, ‘Les Voitures publiques dans la ville de Paris’, 342.

55 With the exception of post horns and stagecoach horns used in various European regions, vehicular horns were not used widely until the second half of the nineteenth century. In Paris, hand-held coach horns were routinely used on recreational four-in-hand vehicles beginning in the 1860s. For more on vehicle signals in Paris, see Viney, Victor and Passevant, Alexandre, Méthode de trompe de mail-coach (Paris, 1893)Google Scholar.

56 ‘On a abusé des omnibus dont les trompettes se rendent à chaque instant coupable de violation de domicile.’ From Unknown, ‘L'esprit d'association’, Le figaro 7 (28 June 1832), 3.

57 Unknown, ‘Nouvelle machine à crier vive le Roà, sans compter les anciennes’, Le charivari 2 (18 August 1833), 4.

58 The design did not feature horns, but an organ that the driver operated with similar foot bellows. Le charivari 2 (18 August 1833), 4.

59 ‘Le conducteur de l'omnibus, qui joue de la trompette avec son pied.’ From [Paulin] Deslandes and [Charles] Didier, Un véritable amour, drame en 3 actes (Paris, 1836), 22.

60 Boutin, Aimée, City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris (Urbana, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Madame de la Fuÿe claimed that this music box propelled Verne's interest in invention and mechanics. Marguerite Allotte de la Fuÿe, Jules Verne: sa vie, son œuvre (Paris, 1927; rpt. Paris, 1966), 22.

62 M.G. Grandidier, ed., La géographie: bulletin de la Société de géographie 51 (Paris, 1929), 197.

63 Evidently, the musical mechanism was not the only imaginative embellishment Madame Allotte de la Fuÿe added to her uncle's biography. Other inconsistencies are addressed in Evans, Arthur B., Jules Verne Rediscovered: Didacticism and the Scientific Novel (New York, 1988)Google Scholar, see notes on p. 21.

64 B. de Grimm, ‘Théâtre Royal de l'Opéra-Comique: première représentation de la reprise de la Dame Blanche’, La France musicale 4 (3 January 1841), 175.

65 Grimm wrote, ‘En somme, c'est une excellent reprise que celle de la dame blanche, qui n'aurait jamais dû être écartée du répertoire [de l'Opéra-Comique].’ Grimm, ‘Théâtre Royal de l'Opéra-Comique’, 177.

66 ‘La dame blanche offre au public tout l'attrait de la nouveauté.’ From Unknown, ‘Théâtres, fêtes, et concerts’, La presse 6 (17 May 1841), 3.

67 Fétis wrote, ‘le génie du compositeur s’était retrempé dans une source de verdeur et de jeunesse’. Fétis, Édouard, ‘Revue d'un demi-siècle: L'Opéra-comique de 1815 à 1830’, Revue et gazette musicale 17/45 (10 November 1850), 3–4Google Scholar.

68 ‘By the decree of April 13th, the President of the Republic, according to the report of the Minister of Interior, authorised the substitution of the name Place Boieldieu for that of Place des Italiens that rests in the location where the Opéra-Comique is situated in Paris.’ (‘Par décret du 13 avril, le Président de la République, sur le rapport du ministre de l'intérieur, a autorisé la substitution du nom de place Boïeldieu à celui de place des Italiens que porte l'emplacement où est situé le théâtre de l'Opéra-Comique à Paris.’) From Unknown, ‘Nouvelles’, Revue et gazette musicale 19 (2 May 1852), 6. Petition signed by Auber, Daniel, Adam, Adolphe, Carafa, Michele, Halévy, Fromental, Onslow, George and Thomas, Ambroise in, ‘Nouvelles’, Revue et gazette musicale 18 (6 April 1851), 6Google Scholar.

69 After the dedication of ‘Place Boieldieu’, numerous streets were named after Parisian composers, such as Rue Halévy (1864), Rue Adam (1864), Rue Auber (1865), Rue Hérold (1881) and Rue Ambroise-Thomas (1897). Rue Rossini (1850) is one notable exception that not only predates the dedication of ‘Place Boieldieu’ but was also designated even before the composer's death in 1868. For further history of Parisian street names, see Hillairet, Jacques, Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris ([Paris], 1963)Google Scholar and Simeone, Nigel, ‘Musical Street Names in Paris’, Paris: A Musical Gazetteer (New Haven, 2000), 258–62Google Scholar.

70 This board was based on the traditional eighteenth-century game Jeu d'oie. Béraldi, Henri, Les graveurs du xix siècle: guide de l'amateur d'estampes modernes, vol. 9 (Paris, 1890), 225–9Google Scholar. The image of the Jeu des omnibus et dames blanches board game, found in the private collection of fashion designer Emile Hermès, was used to create the company's first issue of silk scarves in 1937.

71 The game designer took artistic liberties by colouring the vehicles in bright shades even though the Dames Blanches were painted white and the EGO vehicles black and white.

72 The sheet music publication was announced for the price of 6 francs in, Unknown, ‘Announces’, Revue musicale 3 (1829), 71. Regrettably, the score has not been preserved.

73 Musard, Philippe, Les clic clac des omnibus (London, 1829)Google Scholar, musical score.

74 Adolphe Adam, Le clic clac des omnibus, Op. 33 (Mayence and Anvers, 1829), musical score.

75 Alkan, Charles-Valentin, Les omnibus: variations pour le piano forte (Paris, 1830)Google Scholar, musical score.

76 William Alexander Eddie likens the thematic material of the piano variation to an ‘operatic-type theme’. See Eddie, Charles Valentin Alkan: His Life and His Music (Aldershot, 2013), 29–30.

77 Contemporary operatic piano variations typically open with a showy introduction and present an aria or chorus theme at the beginning of the thematic presentation. Alkan would likely have been familiar with Herz's ‘Variations brillantes sur le chœur favori de “Il crocciato”’ (c.1826) and ‘Grandes variations brillantes sur l'air favori “Le petit tambour”’ (1824), among others. Alkan adjusts this model slightly by presenting the song-like horn call towards the end of the thematic presentation.

78 Parisians might have been familiar with coach horn signals, standardised on English postal vehicles in the late eighteenth century and adopted by the French in the mid-nineteenth century. See Viney and Passevant, Méthode de trompe de mail-coach, 39–41. Various military and other natural horn calls are notated in, Monelle, Raymond, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral (Bloomington, 2006), 284Google Scholar.

79 Octave Uzanne, La locomotion à travers le temps, les mœurs et l'espace: résumé pittoresque et anecdotique de l'histoire générale des moyens de transports terrestres et aériens (Paris, 1913), 133. Brice Thomas, ‘Les omnibus de Paris: leurs transformation’, Le guide du carrossier (Paris, c.1870), n/a. Copy of Plate in archives of Carriage Museum of America, Lexington, KY, folder ‘omnibus’.

80 Pougin, Arthur, Boieldieu: sa vie, ses œuvres, son caractère, sa correspondance (Paris, 1875), 266Google Scholar.

81 Carteret wrote, ‘la Dame blanche, célèbre comme opéra comique et comme omnibus’, in Grand-Carteret, John, Les almanachs français: bibliographie-iconographie (Paris, 1896), XLVIIIGoogle Scholar.

82 Papayanis, Horse-drawn Cabs in Paris, 61.

83 Papayanis, Horse-drawn Cabs in Paris, 87–131.

84 On excerpts of La dame blanche performed in salons, see appendix in Tunley, David, Salons, Singers, and Songs: A Background to Romantic French Song 1830–1870 (Aldershot, 2002)Google Scholar. The popularity of Georges's aria ‘Ah! Quel plaisir d’être soldat’ inspires a humorous anecdote about a nobleman rehearsing the piece for a salon performance in Comettant, Oscar, ‘Le pianiste-accompagnateur’, Revue et gazette musicale 29 (14 December 1862), 3Google Scholar.

85 For a complete list of operas presented during the Exposition Universelle, see Fauser, Annegret, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World's Fair (Rochester, 2005), Appendix 2, 332–3Google Scholar. La dame blanche had a privileged status at the Opéra-Comique and was one of four operas selected to be painted on the foyer walls of the opera house. The other featured operas were Adam's Le chalet (1834), Massé's Les noces de Jeannette (1853) and Hérold's Zampa (1831). The mural, created by artist Albert Maignan in 1898, depicts the most famous scenes in the history of the company. See Gaultier, Paul, Décoration du foyer de l'Opéra-comique par Albert Maignan (Paris, 1899)Google Scholar.

86 ‘Vous pensez bien que la Dame Blanche est en première ligne … Qu'a-t-elle donc pour elle, cette pièce qui compte soixante-cinq ans d'existence et qui reste sur la brèche, irrésistible dans son éternel succès? Elle est la Dame Blanche, elle fait partie de Paris.’ M. Savigny [Henri Lavoix], ‘Les théâtres’, L'illustration 47 (1889), 158.

87 The ceremony was similar to the memorial proceedings for Grétry, which also included the coronation of the composer's bust at the Théâtre Feydeau. See Unknown, ‘Les obsèques de Grétry’, Le ménéstrel 3 (10 January 1836), 1.

88 Lovy, J., ‘Semaine Théâtrale’, Le ménestrel 30 (21 December 1862), 21Google Scholar.

89 Lovy, ‘Semaine théâtrale’, 21.