Racine Redux?: The Operatic Afterlife of Phèdre

Abstract

Racine Redux?: The Operatic Afterlife οι Phèdre Downing Thomas IMAGINE PHÈDRE AS OPERA. The idea is only slightly less ludicrous, or scandalous, now than it was in 1733, the year of the premiere of Hippolyte et Aricie, the first tragédie en musique by fifty-year-old newcomer Jean-Philippe Rameau and his aging librettist, the abbé Simon Joseph Pellegrin. Yet Racine was no stranger to opera.1 Marc Fumaroli has argued that with Phèdre Racine simultaneously staged the apocalypse of classical tragedy "pour dénoncer le théâtre comme parole criminelle," and definitively rejected the temptation of opera. The latter makes its fleeting appearance in the failed idyll of Hippolyte and Aricie with its pastoral atmosphere and implicit references to Tasso's Aminta, an idyll that vanishes like a mirage at the end of the play within "le récit de Théramène, dont l'oraison funèbre d'Hippolyte est un admirable tableau d'opéra à machines" (Fumaroli, 516). One only has to recall Hippolyte's melodious, lyrical alexandrines: "Présente, je vous fuis, absente, je vous trouve;/Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit;/La lumière du jour, les ombres de la nuit,/Tout retrace à mes yeux les charmes que j'évite;/Tout vous livre à l'envie le rebelle Hippolyte" (2.2.54246 ). Racine was never closer to opera. In the end, though, Théramène 's speech sublimely exorcizes the monstrosity of the operatic spectacle through the figure of the "Indomptable taureau, dragon impétueux," which slaughters Hippolyte (5.6.1498-1593). Fumaroli concludes that Phèdre represents "[Ie] jugement demier du théâtre sur le théâtre" (517). If Phèdre can be read as a final statement, a gesture of confession toward a past at Port-Royal and an ingenious mise-en-abîme of operatic spectacle in all its excess, then Hippolyte et Aricie, as Rameau 's first opera, might be read as a response to Racine and a commentary on the situation of the lyric theater in the wake of classical tragedy. Racine had used the specter of opera in Phèdre to define tragedy against its lyric rival, as he had earlier in the preface to Iphigénie. I want to examine what was at stake for Rameau, Pellegrin, and their public in revisiting Racine's tragedy in 1733. I will argue that Rameau 's work could only succeed by simultaneously embodying and erasing Phèdre, and even tragedy itself. From its beginnings in the early 1670s with Lully and Quinault, the 82 Summer 1998 Thomas tragédie en musique was seen by critics as the other of classical tragedy, an object of intense promise and idealization for some, a vehicle of moral danger and aesthetic min for others. On the one hand, as a fantasmatic version of ancient tragedy, the "reinvention" of opera held out the promise of resuscitating the mythical presence of Greek theater while correcting its faults. ClaudeFran çois de Ménestrier's description of the music of the ancients, for example , published in 1681, bears an uncanny resemblance to Lully's and Quinault's operas, as if the tragédie en musique had simultaneously reincarnated ancient tragedy and superseded it.2 Similarly, by 1715, l'abbé Terrasson considered that opera had perfected ancient tragedy and remarked that it made both tragedy and epic obsolete.3 On the other hand, many saw the operatic spectacle and its music as vacuous , sensual pleasure with no rational underpinning—the perverted twin of classical tragedy. Concerned with the lyric theater's lack of adequate theorization , Antoine-Louis LeBrun observed that "la Tragédie a pour son objet la terreur & la compassion; la Comedie a pour le sien l'instruction, & la réforme des moeurs: mais on ne sçauroit dire précisément quel est celui de l'Opéra."4 For Saint-Évremond, more starkly, opera had abandoned the mimetic foundation of art. Like many others, he accused opera of being the principal force behind the decline of tragedy.5 Opera's perceived aesthetic monstrosity was echoed by many commentators who spoke of its generic deformity and irregularity . André Dacier, for example, termed operas "les grotesques...

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