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‘Tout, dans ses charmes, est dangereux’: music, gesture and the dangers of French pantomime, 1748–1775
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2010
Abstract
In 1779 Chabanon noted the potential danger inherent in gesture because it might produce instantaneous and harmful effects. This article examines how Rameau, Rousseau and Grétry incorporated putatively dangerous gestures into the pantomimes they wrote for their operas, and explains why these pantomimes matter at all. In Rameau's Pygmalion (1748), Rousseau's Le Devin du village (1752–3) and Grétry's Céphale et Procris (1773, 1775), pantomime was presented as a type of dance opposite to the conventional social dance. But the significance of this binary opposition changed drastically around 1750, in response to Rousseau's own moral philosophy developed most notably in the First Discourse (1750). Whereas the pantomimes in Rameau's Pygmalion dismiss peasants as uncultured, it is high culture that becomes the source of corruption in the pantomime of Rousseau's Le Devin du village, where uncultured peasants are praised for their morality. Grétry extended Rousseau's moral claim in the pantomime of Céphale et Procris by commending an uneducated girl who turns down sexual advances from a courtier. Central to these pantomimes are the ways in which musical syntax correlates with drama. Contrary to the predictable syntax in most social dances, these pantomimes bring to the surface syntactical anomalies that may be taken to represent moral licence: an unexpected pause, a jarring diminished-seventh chord, and a phrase in a minuet with odd-number bars communicate danger. Although social dances were still the backbone of most French operas, pantomime provided an experimental interface by which composers contested the meanings of expressive topoi; it thus emerged as a vehicle for progressive social thinking.
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References
1 ‘Le geste appliqué à un mot métaphysique, en devient la démonstration physique, & la définition détaillée. L'amour embrasse, la haine tue, l'orgueil met au dessous de soi. La vérité d'un tel langage a quelque chose d'effrayante: elle dit ce que des mots ne disent pas. Tous les jours on prononce & l'on entend ce mot: je hais, sans être ému; qui ne le seroit pas, si le geste du meurtre remplacoit la parole?’ Michel Paul Guy de Chabanon, Observations sur la musique, et principalement sur la métaphysique de l'art (Paris, 1779), 89; reprint, in idem, De la musique considérée en elle-même (Paris, 1785), 121–2.
2 Voltaire, ‘Epîtres à Mlle Clairon’, Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols. (Paris, 1877–85), X, 275.
3 Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, in Diderot: Œuvres, ed. Laurent Versini, 5 vols. (Paris, 1996), IV, 18.
4 Louis de Cahusac, Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, 28 vols. (Paris, 1757), VII, s.v. ‘Geste’.
5 For a good introduction to the kinds of gestures performed in the fair theatres, see Robert Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New York, 1986), 22–59. On the lazzi, see David Trott, ‘Histoire et Recueil des Lazzis: A Case of Early Performance Analysis’, in The Performance Text, ed. Domenico Pietropaolo (New York, 1999), 251–63. On the forains, see Jacqueline Waeber, ‘“Le Devin de la Foire”? Revaluating the Pantomime in Rousseau's Devin du village’, in Musique et geste en France de Lully à la Révolution: Études sur la musique, le théâtre et la danse, ed. Jacqueline Waeber (Bern, 2009), 149–74. Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau remains a good testimony to the eighteenth-century fascination with gesture. Though fictional, Diderot depicted Lui's pantomimes in vivid details through facial expressions and grotesque gestures. For detailed analyses of the pantomimes in Le Neveu, see Herbert Joseph, Diderot's Dialogue of Language and Gesture (Columbus, 1969), 131–201.
6 Chabanon, Observations sur la musique, 93, 95–6.
7 Chabanon, 97.
8 See, for example, Judith Schwartz, ‘The Passacaille in Lully's Armide: Phrase Structure in the Choreography and the Music’, Early Music, 26 (1998), 300.
9 By investigating a late eighteenth-century choreography by Auguste Ferrère, Carol G. Marsh and Rebecca Harris-Warrick have reconstructed ways in which music corresponded to dance steps and gestures. Their work demonstrates how narrative elements and dances alternated in eighteenth-century ballet-pantomime and offers many useful guiding principles on analysing music and gesture. See Carol G. Marsh and Rebecca Harris-Warrick, ‘Putting Together a Pantomime Ballet’, in The Grotesque Dancer on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Gennaro Magri and His World, ed. Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Bruce Alan Brown (Madison, 2005), 231–78.
10 Leonard Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, Style (New York, 1980). Other classic studies of topoi include V. Kofi Agawu, Playing With Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton, 1991), 26–50; and Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gestures in Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (Chicago, 1983), 13–72. See also Allanbook's ‘Theorizing the Comic Surface’, in Music in the Mirror: Reflections on the History of Music Theory and Literature for the 21st Century, ed. Andreas Giger and Thomas J. Mathiesen (Lincoln, NB, and London, 2002), 195–216; and ‘Comic Issues in Mozart's Piano Concertos’, in Mozart's Piano Concertos: Text, Context, Interpretation (Ann Arbor, 1996), 75.
11 Peasant dance appeared frequently in French Baroque ballets. Lully wrote village weddings in his Ballet des plaisirs (1655), Ballet de l'amour malade (1657), his mascarade ridicule Le noces de village (1663), Ballet de Flore (1669), Le carnaval mascarade (1675), a mascarade in 1683, and Entrée de paysan in Act IV, scene 3 of Roland (1685). See Rebecca Harris-Warrick, ‘La mariée: The History of a French Court Dance’, in Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque: Essays in Honor of James R. Anthony, ed. John Hajdu Heyer (Cambridge, 1989), 239–57, esp. 245–6. Peasants are also found in Ballet des arts (1663) – in which Louis XIV dressed as a shepherd – and Le triomphe des arts (1700). See Georgia J. Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV & the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago, 2008), 161–90.
12 In the Preface to Le Triomphe des arts, Lamotte explained how he combined the story of Propetide with that of Pygmalion, which followed the story of the Propetides in Ovid's Metamorphoses. LE TRIOMPHE DES ARTS. / BALLET. / REPRESENTE. / PAR L'ACADEMIE ROYALE DE MUSIQUE. / Le seizième jour de May, 1700. / A PARIS. / Chez CHRISTOPHE BALLARD, seul Imprimeur du Roy pour la Musique, ruë S. Jean de Beauvais, au Mont Parnasse. / M. DCC. / AVEC PRIVILEGE DE SA MAJESTE. ‘Avertissement’, 7.
13 Marian Hannah Winter, Pre-Romantic Ballet (London, 1974), 85.
14 Marie-Françoise Christout, ‘Quelques interprètes de la danse dans l'opéra de Rameau’, in Jean-Philippe Rameau: colloque international organisé par La Société Rameau, Dijon: 21–24 Septembre 1983, ed. Jérôme de la Gorce (Paris, 1987), 544–5; Sarah McCleave, ‘Marie Sallé and the Development of the Ballet en action’, Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 3 (2007–8), 1–23, esp. 14–15; for a discussion of reception history of the flower scene, see Edward Nye, ‘L'allégorie dans le ballet d'action: Marie Sallé à travers l'écho des parodies’, Revue d'histoire littéraire de la france, 108 (2008), 289–309, esp. 300–1.
15 ‘Le Peuple danse autour de la Statue’. PIGMALION, / ACTE DE BALLET, / REPRÉSENTE, / POUR LA PREMIÈRE FOIS / PAR L'ACADÉMIE ROYALE DE MUSIQUE, / A LA SUITE DU CARNAVAL ET DE LA FOLIE. / Le Mardi 27 Août, 1748. / PRIX XII SOLS. /AUX DEPENS DE L'ACADÉMIE. / On trouvera les Livrets de Paroles à la Salle de l'Opéra et à l'Académie Royale de Musique, rue St. Nicaile. / M. DCC. XLVIII. / AVEC APPROBATION ET PRIVILEGE DU ROI, 9.
16 BNF (Paris), Musique MS, H. 720. Lionel Sawkins identified a group of copyists, including ‘Le Sr. Brice, Garde de la Bibliothèque Musique de la Chambre du Roy’ and ‘Le Sr. Durand’, chief copyist at the Opéra, who wrote the stage directions in the manuscript copy of Pygmalion (Sawkins, ‘New Sources for Rameau's “Pygmalion” and Other Works’, Early Music, 11 [1983], 491). Unusually, Rameau published these dances in the first edition and kept them in the same order in the manuscript copy, indicating that he paid no less attention to the dances than to the rest of the opera.
17 According to Cuthbert Girdlestone (Jean-Philippe Rameau: His Life and Work [London, 1957], 407), Rameau often concealed its satirical content. The ‘pantomime niaise’ could be easily overlooked, for its ‘niaisierie’ is less obvious than the ‘warm, caressing tone’ of the music.
18 According to the livret, the ‘pantomime niaise’ was danced by the ‘grotesque peasants’ (‘paysans grotesques’) Jean-Barthélemy Lany and Pietro Sodi (also known as Pierre Sodi).
19 For an extensive discussion of monstrosity in Rameau's music, see Charles Dill, Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (Princeton, 1998), 3–30 and 138–9. The ‘grotesque’ in French Baroque dance had its roots in the Renaissance. See Mark Franko, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge, 1993), 63–107.
20 Watelet, Encyclopédie, VII, s.v. ‘grotesque’.
21 Dill has suggested that Rameau sometimes used ‘the presence of music as dramatic information’, but here the reverse is true: the absence of sound could be said to communicate dramatic meaning. Dill, Monstrous Opera, 29.
22 ‘Très viste. On continue de danser comme si l'air continuoit toujours, et sur le commencement du suivant il y a surprise. &c.’ BNF (Paris), Musique MS, H. 720 is a clean copy with the inscription ‘Au Roy’ on the front page, suggesting that the copy was prepared to be sent to the king.
23 Rameau used this kind of grotesque style in his comédie-lyrique Platée (1745). See Michel Noiray, ‘Hippolyte et Castor travestis: Rameau à l'opéra comique’, in Jean-Philippe Rameau: Colloque international, 110–11; Downing A. Thomas, ‘Rameau's Platée Returns: A Case of Double Identity in the Querelle des Bouffons’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 18 (2006), 1–19.
24 For the history of Le Devin du village, see Cynthia Verba, ‘Historical Background’, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Le Devin du village, ed. Charlotte Kaufmann (Madison, 1998), xi–xx; Jacqueline Waeber, ‘“Cette horrible innovation”: The First Version of the Recitative Parts of Rousseau's Le Devin du village’, Music & Letters, 82 (2001), 177–213, esp. 185–9. Daniel Heartz has suggested that the French elements of the intermède have been underestimated partly because Rousseau himself claimed an inspiration by Italian comic opera. Heartz has observed that the text of Rousseau's Le Devin du village has little or nothing to do with Italian comic operas. On the other hand, the rural, sentimental, pastoral tone in Le Devin du village, fully in line with Favart's opéras comiques and vaudevilles, anticipated Italian sentimental comedy, most notably Piccinni's La buona figiuola (Rome, 1760); Heartz, ‘Italian by Intention, French of Necessity: Rousseau's Le Devin du village’, in Echos de France & d'Italie: Liber amicorum Yves Gérard, ed. Marie-Claire Mussat, Jean Mongrédien and Jean-Michel Nectoux (Paris, 1997), 31–46; reprint in From Garrick to Gluck: Essays on Opera in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. John A. Rice (New York, 2004), 225–36.
25 In the highly successful rerun of Pygmalion in 1751, Rameau was reported to have been moved to tears. Paul-Marie Masson, L'Opéra de Rameau (Paris, 1930), 79.
26 Friedrich Melchior, Baron de Grimm, ‘Lettre sur Omphale’, in Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, 16 vols. (Paris, 1882), XVI, 307.
27 Rousseau first published the letter entitled ‘Lettre à M. Grimm, au sujet des remarques ajoutées à sa lettre sur Omphale’ anonymously in April 1752. Rousseau, ‘Lettre à M. Grimm’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond, et al., 5 vols. (Paris, 1959–95), V: 264; for a translation, see ‘Letter to M. Grimm on the Subject of the Remarks Added to his Letter on “Omphale”’, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, VII, trans. and ed. John T. Scott (Hanover, 1998), 123–4.
28 ‘L'Anny divenne il chirurgo di tutti li pantomimi che avevano le braccia storpiate’. Ange Goudar, ‘Sopra il ballo da Osservazioni sopra la musica ed il ballo (1773)’, in Il ballo pantomimo: Lettere, saggi e libelli sulla danza (1773–1785), ed. Carmela Lombardi (Turin, 1998), 25–6. According to Winter (Pre-Romantic Ballet, 141), Goudar stated in Observations sur les trios derniers Ballets Pantomimes (1759), that ‘all the qualities of a maître de ballets are united in M. Lany of the Opéra’.
29 In Lettre sur les sourds et muets, Diderot used a musical example, an excerpt from Virgil's Aeneid, and an illustration of a dying woman to demonstrate how these three arts interrelate. See Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, IV, 44–5. Rousseau acknowledged Diderot's point in his Lettre sur la musique françoise, in Œuvres complètes, V: 291–328, at 306–7. For a detailed discussion of the emergence of Rousseau's ‘unity of melody’, see Jacqueline Waeber, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau's “unité de mélodie”’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 62 (2009), 79–144, esp. 95–109.
30 Rousseau, ‘Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse’, in Œuvres complètes, II, 287.
31 Rousseau, ‘Preface’, in Œuvres complètes, II, 965; translation taken from Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (First Discourse); and Polemics, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. II, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, 1990), 191.
32 For a recent study of this set of issues, see Jacqueline Waeber, En musique dans le texte: le mélodrame de Rousseau à Schoenberg (Paris, 2006), esp. 17–50.
33 On this question, see Downing A. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647–1785 (Cambridge, 2002), 17–52. For a classic study of story and performance vis-à-vis the aesthetics of French theatre, see Catherine Kintzler, Poétique de l'opéra français de Corneille à Rousseau (Paris, 1991), esp. 244–97.
34 See, for example, Thomas Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1993), 12–13, 215–17; Downing A. Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995), 143–72.
35 Rousseau, ‘Preface to Narcisse’, 193.
36 Rousseau was not the first composer who synchronised music with gesture. An earlier example is Antoine-François Riccoboni's Pygmalion, set to music by Jean-Joseph Mouret (1734).
37 Diderot, Entretiens sur le Fils Naturel, Œuvres, IV, 1185.
38 But Grétry was clearly thinking about issues of mute language and silent expression. In his drame lyrique Les Marriages samnites (1768), based originally on one of Marmontel's moral tales of the same title, Grétry used extensive physical gestures to indicate heightened expression. This suggests that Grétry was sympathetic to contemporary theoretical discussions of gesture and silent expression. Les Marriages samnites also sets an important precedent for his experiment of silent expression in the pantomime of Céphale et Procris.
39 Noverre staged his first ballet-pantomime at the Opéra as a divertissement in Laborde's tragédie lyrique, Ismène et Ismènia, premièred at the Opéra on 11 December 1770.
40 Grimm, Correspondance littéraire, XI, 26.
41 ‘La pièce que vous allez recevoir est susceptible de beaucoup de soin. Paris néglige tous les accessoires, et ils ont grand tort. Une personne nous avoit proposé d'exécuter une pantomime d'ombres derrière un transparent. La place étoit après le chœur: “O grand Albert”. Nous n'avons pas osé risquer cette plaisanterie, qui peut-être auroit réussi … Enfin ce projet n'a pas été bien digéré.’ Letter from Grétry to Vitzthumb dated 21 February 1775 in La correspondance générale de Grétry: Augmentée de nombreux documents relatifs à la vie et aux œuvres du compositeur liégeois, ed. Georges de Froidcourt (Brussels, 1962), 77.
42 No identifiable performance materials for the 1773 Versailles version survive, but the livret of the 1773 version suggests strongly that some kind of pantomime was used in Act I, scene 5, for two verbal snippets indicating stage actions were printed, the second of them resembles closely to the pantomime of the 1775 version (which was printed in the engraved edition but not in the 1775 livret): ‘Une jeune Nymphe, nouvellement reçue parmi celles de DIANE, est armé chasseresse’. After the aria ‘Dans les bois’ (eliminated in the 1775 version), the Nymphs were to perform the following actions: ‘Les Nymphes enseignent à leur nouvelle Compagne à fuir les piéges de l'Amour. L'une de elles ayant sur le front le bandeau de ce Dieu, en imite toute les ruses. La jeune Nymphe s'en défend, & on applaudit à son triomphe.’ CÉPHALE ET PROCRIS, OU L'AMOUR CONJUGAL, / TRAGÉDIE LYRIQUE, / EN TROIS ACTES, / Représentée, devant SA MAJESTÉ, / à Versailles, le 30 Décembre 1773. / DE IMPRIMERIE DE PIERRE-ROBERT-CHRISTOPHE BALLARD, seul imprimeur pour la Musique de la Chambre & Menus-Plaisirs du Roi, & seul Imprimeur de la grande Chapelle de Sa Majesté. / M. DCC. LXXIII. / Par exprès Commandement de Sa Majesté, 24.
43 Grétry, Mémoires ou Essais sur la musique; reprint, Voyages, études et travaux de A.-M. Grétry, racontés par lui-même (Paris, 1889), 136.
44 Grétry, Mémoires, 140.
45 This is not to say that Rousseau and Grétry were the only composers who wrote gestural directions in their scores, although they may have been among the few composers in Paris to do so. Reform choreographers including Noverre, Hildverding and Angiolini performed pantomimes with descriptive music in Stuttgart, Vienna and Milan. While in Stuttgart, Noverre collaborated with the composer and violinist Jean-Joseph Rodolph (or Johann-Joseph Rudolph), who wrote music for a number of Noverre's ballet-pantomimes, including Renaud et Armide (1761), Hypermnestre (1762) and Medée et Jason (1763). In the manuscript copy of Médée et Jason currently kept at the Bibliothèque Musée de l'Opéra (A. 236a), Rodolph wrote detailed descriptions corresponding music to gesture. The choreographers Hildverding and Angiolini also used descriptive music in their ballets performed in Vienna in the 1750s and 1760s. See Bruce Alan Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna (Oxford, 1991), 143–93, 282–357. In Milan, pantomime-ballets were performed as early as the 1740s. See Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell, ‘Opera and Ballet at the Regio Ducal Teatro, 1771–1776: A Musical and Social History’ (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1980), 599–639.
46 The 1775 manuscript copy is preserved in Paris, in the Bibliothèque Musée de l'Opéra, MS A. 233 b (I–III). The 1777 version is preserved as Rés. 109 (I–III). The score was published in August 1775, three months after the Paris performance.
47 Mercure de France (June 1775), 180. According to the list of dancers printed in the livret, Gardel was the only one dancing in both the second and third acts. Vestris and Guimard performed only in one dance: the ‘suite de l'amour’ from the pantomime in Act III.
48 This point is noted in the review of Céphale et Procris published in the Mercure de France (June 1775), 168–9.
49 According to Rebecca Harris-Warrick, the word ‘mouvement’ should be translated as ‘tempo’. See Monsieur de Saint Lambert, Principles of the Harpsichord, trans. and ed. Harris-Warrick (Cambridge, 1984), 32, n. 1.
50 It is debatable to what extent the engraved 1775 version truly reflects any performance of Céphale et Procris. Given that none of the manuscripts is truly identical with the engraved 1775 version, Grétry might have published the engraved version as an ideal version that never corresponded exactly with any performance. As it was a common practice in eighteenth-century Paris to alter an opera or a ballet after its performance, particularly in light of reviews, the sources reveal that Grétry kept the two minuets as the backbone of the divertissement while experimenting with various combinations of dances.
51 Charles Compan, Dictionnaire de danse: a fascimile of the Paris 1787 ed. (New York, 1974), s.v. ‘Contredanse’, 101.
52 David Charlton has explored the phenomenon of text addition to pre-existing minuets. This kind of parody became a convention of opéra comique beginning around 1745. The ‘minuet-scenes’ in the opéra comiques composed by Favart and Grétry provided working models for Beaumarchais when he wrote Le Mariage de Figaro, which later became the blueprint for Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro. See David Charlton, ‘“Minuet-Scenes”: in Early Opéra-Comique’, in Timbre und Vaudeville. Zur Geschichte und Problematik einer populären Gattung im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Herbert Schneider (Hildesheim, 1999), 156–91.
53 Kellom Tomlinson, The Art of Dancing Explained by Reading and Figures (London, 1724), 105.
54 Rameau, Traité d'Harmonie, trans. Philip Gossett as Treatise on Harmony (New York, 1971), esp. 174–5.
55 Rousseau, Encyclopédie, s.v. ‘Menuet’, X, 346; reprint in Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique, s.v. ‘Menuet’.
56 Alexis Bacquoy-Guédon, Méthode pour exercer l'oreille a la mesure, dans l'art de la danse (Amsterdam and Paris, 1785), 10. In his discussion of the duple-time Contredanse, Bacquoy-Guédon (Méthode, 22) described the strong/weak beats by means of the metaphor of good/bad bars.
57 Bacquoy-Guédon, Méthode pour exercer l'oreille a la mesure, 11.
58 Compan, Dictionniare de Danse, 231–2.
59 See Tilden A. Russell, ‘The Unconventional Dance Minuet: Choreographies of the Menuet d'Exaudet’, Acta Musicologia, 64 (1992), 118–38.
60 Couperin, for example, wrote an odd-numbered minuet in 6/8 time in his second book of Pièces de clavecin (1716–17). Philip Gossett has remarked that Lully wrote dances of a variety of phrase structure. Rameau included a fifteen-bar piece in Traité d'Harmonie (Book 3, chapter 43, p. 347) that contradicts his own rule. See Treatise on Harmony, 175, n. 92. However, one could argue that Rameau himself did not call this fifteen-bar piece a dance, nor did he use the example to illustrate a dance.
61 Stefan Eckert has recently shown that Joseph Riepel used the normative even-numbered minuet as a pedagogical tool to teach rhythmic motion, phrase structure, odd-numbered phrasing and large-scale structural coherence. See Stefan Eckert, ‘So You Want to Write a Minuet: Historical Perspectives in Teaching Theory’, Music Theory Online, 11/2 (2005). For a good introduction to Riepel's pedagogical method on phrasing, see Joel Lester, Compositional Theory in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 258–72. For a good discussion of the structural functions of hemiolas in minuets composed by Lully, Couperin, Bach, Rameau, Philidor and Destouches, see Herbert Schneider, ‘Structures métriques du menuet au XVIIe et au début du XVIIIe siècle’, Revue de Musicologie, 78 (1992), 27–65.
62 Riepel, Anfangsgründe zur musicalischen Setzkunst (Regensburg, 1752), 38.
63 One example is the minuet in his Symphony No. 77. Gretchen A. Wheelock has argued that Haydn's mature minuets show suggestive structural interruptions, disorders and delays that represent humorous gestures. See Gretchen A. Wheelock, Haydn's Ingenious Jesting with Art: Contexts of Musical Wit and Humor (New York, 1992), 55–89. Melanie Lowe analyses Haydn's minuets in terms of topical consonance, topical dissonance and topical enrichment. The addition of canon in the minuets of Symphony No. 3 (composed before 1762) and Symphony No. 23, for example, suggests a kind of ‘topical dissonance’ that challenges the stately, conservative idiom of the minuet dance. She argues that Haydn challenged the identity and status of the minuet by playing with the expressive content of the minuet. See her ‘Falling from Grace: Irony and Expressive Enrichment in Haydn's Symphonic Minuets’, The Journal of Musicology, 19 (2002), 171–221.
64 For a discussion of phraseology in late eighteenth-century minuets, see Tilden A. Russell, ‘Minuet Form and Phraseology in Recueils and Manuscript Tunebooks’, Journal of Musicology, 17 (1999), 386–419, esp. 399–419.
65 Yet this odd-numbered phrase did draw attention from contemporary dancers, as this minuet was a popular tune for contemporary ballroom dancing. In her study of manuscript tunebooksand published collections of eighteenth-century dance tunes, Russell has identified sixteen sources that contain this minuet, of which six of them preserved the original 4+8+7 phrase structure. Another six added one bar to the seven-barred phrase, making the phrase structure of the B section 4+8+8, presumably in an attempt to make the dance more danceable for the general public in balls and dance halls. Five other manuscripts show a variety of treatments: one of them repeats the fifth bar of the final phrase, making it another 4+8+8 section. Three of them show the phrase structures of 4+7+8, 4+7+7 and 7+3+8. In one case, the phrase structure 4+8+5 follows that of Grétry's Menuet 3. See Russell, ‘Minuet Form’, 412–15. In a recent recording of this minuet, the conductor Stefan Sanderling did not use Grétry's original version; instead, he used a version edited by the Austrian conductor Felix Mottl, who added a bar at the end of the B section, making it exhibit a 4+8+8 phrase structure. See André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, Suites & Overtures, Including Zémire et Azor Pantomime, Orchestre de Bretagne, Stefan Sanderling, CD DCA 1095 (2001) © 2001 ASV Ltd.
66 This sung dance belonged to a tradition called ‘parodier un air de danse’ in French opera. See Girdlestone, Jean-Philippe Rameau: His Life and Work, 116.
67 In Act I, scene 1 of Echo et Narcisse (1779), Gluck highlighted the minuet as a dance opposite to what he called an ‘Air marqué’ in order to portray a dramatic confrontation between the Nymphs and the Sylvains. After an ‘Air pour les Nymphes and les Sylvains’ that highlights the confrontation, the Nymphs dance a minuet followed by an ‘Air marqué’ danced by the Sylvains. In this case, Gluck's use of the minuet in a dance-pair could be attributed to the dance pairing in Grétry's Céphale et Procris.
68 For a discussion of ways in which the minuet represents elegance and decency, see Julia Sutton, ‘The Minuet: The Elegant Phoenix’, Dance Chronicle, 8 (1985), 119–52.
69 They include a minuet composed for the 1777 rerun of Céphale et Procris, a Menuet Royal that recurs three times in Andromaque (1780) and a menuet grave in the final divertissement of Andromaque, one in Act III, scene 6 of Colinette à la cour (1782) and a menuet chanté et dansé in Act III, scene 9 of Amphitryon (1786).
70 See Grétry, Mémoires, ou essais sur la musique, 3 vols. (New York, 1971), I, 377–81.
71 For a detailed account of Grétry's Les Trois Âges de l'opéra, see M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, ‘A Musician's View of the French Baroque After the Advent of Gluck: Grétry's Les Trois âges de l'Opéra and its Context’, in Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque, ed. John Hajdu Heyer (Cambridge, 1989), 291–318.
72 Grétry did not write all the dances anew. Apart from a gigue and a tambourine he borrowed from Céphale et Procris, Grétry added seven dances by Lully, Rebel, Francoeur, Rameau and Gluck and cited them with incipits in the manuscript copy. It is clear from the way he designed the divertissement within the context of Les Trois Âges de l'opéra that Grétry saw his dance music as a continuation of the French tradition.
73 Bibliothèque nationale de France (Music), Vm. 5 (202).
74 Review of Gardel's La Chercheuse de l'esprit published in the March issue of the Journal de Paris in 1778; reprinted in the Abrégé du Journal de Paris, ou Recueil, part 4 tome 2, part 2, 1181.
75 See, for example, the admiring tone of this review: ‘Some people seem to doubt whether M. Grétry, who excels in arias, would succeed in the same way in recitative and dance music. The problem is well solved … Concerning his ballets, we will add without difficulty that since Rameau we have heard nothing better designed, more varied, more animated, or more favourable for dance’ (Mercure de France [June 1775], 179).
76 Grétry, Mémoires, ou Essai sur la musique (Paris, 1789), 154–5.