Charpentier's Operatic "Roman Musical" as Read in the Wake of the Dreyfus Affair

Abstract

Like many other works presented at the Operacomique at the turn of the century, Gustave Charpentier's Louise was far from a conventional opera-comique: devoid of spoken dialogue, it relied rather on Wagnerian dramaturgy; even its melodic style, as a whole, was distant from the theater's lyric traditions. Charpentier himself proudly emphasized the opera's originality by abjuring traditional generic terms and boldly labeling it a roman musical; undoubtedly inspired by the influence of Emile Zola's novels on the opera's libretto, the appellation was without precedent, even in earlier French Naturalist opera.' And yet in jarring contrast to the composer's avowal of the work's innovations, post-war scholarship has dismissed it as a sentimental melodrama in the tradition of opera-comique.2 This was not the case in the decades following

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