French opera is both the art ofopera inFrance and opera in theFrench language. It is one of Europe's most important operatic traditions, containing works by composers of the stature ofRameau,Berlioz,Gounod,Bizet,Massenet,Debussy,Ravel,Poulenc andMessiaen. Many foreign-born composers have played a part in the French tradition, includingLully,Gluck,Salieri,Cherubini,Spontini,Meyerbeer,Rossini,Donizetti,Verdi andOffenbach.
French opera began at the court ofLouis XIV withJean-Baptiste Lully'sCadmus et Hermione (1673), although there had been various experiments with the form before that, most notablyPomone byRobert Cambert. Lully and his librettistQuinault createdtragédie en musique, a form in which dance music and choral writing were particularly prominent.[1] Lully's most important successor wasRameau. After Rameau's death,Christoph Willibald Gluck was persuaded to produce six operas for theParis Opera in the 1770s. They show the influence of Rameau, but simplified and with greater focus on the drama. At the same time, by the middle of the 18th century another genre was gaining popularity in France:opéra comique, in which arias alternated with spoken dialogue.[2] By the 1820s, Gluckian influence in France had given way to a taste for the operas ofRossini. Rossini'sGuillaume Tell helped found the new genre ofGrand opera, a form whose most famous exponent wasGiacomo Meyerbeer.[3] Lighteropéra comique also enjoyed tremendous success in the hands ofBoieldieu,Auber,Hérold andAdam. In this climate, the operas ofHector Berlioz struggled to gain a hearing. Berlioz's epic masterpieceLes Troyens, the culmination of the Gluckian tradition, was not given a full performance for almost a hundred years after it was written.
In the second half of the 19th century,Jacques Offenbach dominated the new genre ofoperetta with witty and cynical works such asOrphée aux enfers;[4]Charles Gounod scored a massive success withFaust;[5] andGeorges Bizet composedCarmen, probably the most famous French opera of all. At the same time, the influence ofRichard Wagner was felt as a challenge to the French tradition. Perhaps the most interesting response to Wagnerian influence wasClaude Debussy's only operatic masterpiecePelléas et Mélisande (1902).[6] Other notable 20th-century names includeRavel,Poulenc andMessiaen.
The first operas to be staged in France were imported from Italy, beginning withFrancesco Sacrati'sLa finta pazza in 1645. French audiences gave them a lukewarm reception. This was partly for political reasons, since these operas were promoted by the Italian-bornCardinal Mazarin, who was then first minister during the regency of the young Louis XIV and a deeply unpopular figure with large sections of French society. Musical considerations also played a role, since the French court already had a firmly established genre of stage music,ballet de cour, which included sung elements as well as dance and lavish spectacle.[7] When two Italian operas,Francesco Cavalli'sXerse andErcole amante, proved failures in Paris in 1660 and 1662, the prospects of opera flourishing in France looked remote.[8] Yet Italian opera would stimulate the French to make their own experiments at the genre and, paradoxically, it would be an Italian-born composer, Lully, who would found a lasting French operatic tradition.
In 1669,Pierre Perrin founded theAcadémie d'Opéra and, in collaboration with the composerRobert Cambert, tried his hand at composing operatic works in French. Their first effort,Pomone, appeared on stage on 3 March 1671 and was followed a year later byLes peines et plaisirs de l'amour. At this point Louis XIV transferred the privilege of producing operas from Perrin to Jean-Baptiste Lully.[9][10] Lully, aFlorentine, was already the favourite musician of the king, who had assumed full royal powers in 1661 and was intent on refashioning French culture in his image. Lully had a sure instinct for knowing exactly what would satisfy the taste of his master and the French public in general. He had already composed music for extravagant court entertainments as well as for the theatre, most notably thecomédies-ballets inserted into plays byMolière. Yet Molière and Lully had quarrelled bitterly and the composer found a new and more pliable collaborator inPhilippe Quinault, who would write thelibretti for all but two of Lully's operas.
On 27 April 1673, Lully'sCadmus et Hermione – often regarded as the first French opera in the full sense of the term – appeared in Paris.[11] It was a work in a new genre, which its creators Lully and Quinault baptisedtragédie en musique,[12] a form of opera specially adapted for French taste. Lully went on to producetragédies en musique at the rate of at least one a year until his death in 1687 and they formed the bedrock of the French national operatic tradition for almost a century. As the name suggests,tragédie en musique was modelled on the French Classical tragedy ofCorneille andRacine. Lully and Quinault replaced the confusingly elaborate Baroque plots favoured by the Italians with a much clearer five-act structure. Each of the five acts generally followed a regular pattern. An aria in which one of the protagonists expresses their inner feelings is followed byrecitative mixed with short arias (petits airs) which move the action forward. Acts end with adivertissement, the most striking feature of French Baroque opera, which allowed the composer to satisfy the public's love of dance, huge choruses and gorgeous visual spectacle. The recitative, too, was adapted and moulded to the unique rhythms of the French language and was often singled out for special praise by critics, a famous example occurring in Act Two of Lully'sArmide. The five acts of the main opera were preceded by anallegorical prologue, another feature Lully took from the Italians, which he generally used to sing the praises of Louis XIV. Indeed, the entire opera was often thinly disguised flattery of the French monarch, who was represented by the noble heroes drawn from Classical myth or Mediaeval romance.
Thetragédie en musique was a form in which all the arts, not just music, played a crucial role. Quinault's verse combined with the set designs of Carlo Vigarani orJean Bérain and the choreography of Beauchamp and Olivet, as well as the elaborate stage effects known as themachinery.[13] As one of its detractors, Melchior Grimm, was forced to admit: "To judge of it, it is not enough to see it on paper and read the score; one must have seen the picture on the stage".[14][15]
French opera was now established as a distinct genre. Though influenced by Italian models,tragédie en musique increasingly diverged from the form then dominating Italy,opera seria. French audiences disliked thecastrato singers who were extremely popular in the rest of Europe, preferring their male heroes to be sung by thehaute-contre, a particularly high tenor voice. Dramatic recitative was at the heart of Lullian opera, whereas in Italy recitative had dwindled to a perfunctory form known assecco, where the voice was accompanied only by thecontinuo. Likewise, the choruses and dances that were such a feature of French works played little or no part inopera seria. Arguments over the respective merits of French and Italian music dominated criticism throughout the following century,[16] until Gluck arrived in Paris and effectively fused the two traditions in a new synthesis.
Lully had not guaranteed his supremacy as the leading French opera composer through his musical talents alone. In fact, he had used his friendship with King Louis to secure a virtual monopoly on the public performance of stage music.[17] It was only after Lully's death that other opera composers emerged from his shadow. The most noteworthy was probablyMarc-Antoine Charpentier,[18] whose soletragédie en musique,Médée, appeared in Paris in 1693 to a decidedly mixed reception. Lully's supporters were dismayed at Charpentier's inclusion of Italian elements in his opera, particularly the rich and dissonant harmony the composer had learned from his teacherGiacomo Carissimi in Rome. Nevertheless,Médée has been acclaimed as "arguably the finest French opera of the 17th century".[19] Other composers tried their hand attragédie en musique in the years following Lully's death, includingMarin Marais (Alcyone, 1703),André Cardinal Destouches (Télémaque, 1714) andAndré Campra (Tancrède, 1702;Idoménée, 1712).
Campra also invented a new, lighter genre: theopéra-ballet.[20] As the name suggests,opéra-ballet contained even more dance music than thetragédie en musique. The subject matter was generally far less elevated too; the plots were not necessarily derived from Classical mythology and even allowed for the comic elements which Lully had excluded from thetragédie en musique afterThésée (1675).[21] Theopéra-ballet consisted of a prologue followed by a number of self-contained acts (also known asentrées), often loosely grouped round a single theme. The individual acts could also be performed independently, in which case they were known asactes de ballet. Campra's first work in the form,L'Europe galante ("Europe in Love") of 1697, is a good example of the genre. Each of its four acts is set in a different European country (France, Spain, Italy and Turkey) and features ordinary middle-class characters.[22]Opéra-ballet continued to be a tremendously popular form for the rest of the Baroque period.
Another popular genre of the era was thepastorale héroïque, the first example of which was Lully's last completed operaAcis et Galatée (1686).[23] Thepastorale héroïque usually drew on Classical subject matter associated withpastoral poetry and was in three acts, rather than the five of thetragédie en musique.[24] Around this time, some composers also experimented at writing the first French comic operas, a good example beingJean-Joseph Mouret'sLes amours de Ragonde (1714).[25]
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Jean-Philippe Rameau was the most important opera composer to appear in France after Lully.[26] He was also a highly controversial figure and his operas were subject to attacks by both the defenders of the French, Lullian tradition and the champions of Italian music. Rameau was almost fifty when he composed his first opera,Hippolyte et Aricie, in 1733. Until that point, his reputation had mainly rested on his works on music theory. The opera caused an immediate stir. Some members of the audience, like Campra, were struck by its incredible richness of invention. Others, led by the supporters of Lully, found Rameau's use of unusual harmonies and dissonance perplexing and reacted with horror. The war of words between the "Lullistes" and the "Ramistes" continued to rage for the rest of the decade. Rameau made little attempt to create new genres; instead he took existing forms and innovated from within using a musical language of great originality. He was a prolific composer, writing fivetragédies en musique, sixopéra-ballets, numerouspastorales héroïques andactes de ballets as well as two comic operas, and often revising his works several times until they bore little resemblance to their original versions.
By 1745, Rameau had won acceptance as the official court composer, but a new controversy broke out in the 1750s. This was the so-calledQuerelle des Bouffons, in which supporters of Italian opera, such as the philosopher and musicianJean-Jacques Rousseau, accused Rameau of being an old-fashioned, establishment figure. The "anti-nationalists" (as they were sometimes known) rejected Rameau's style, which they felt was too precious and too distanced from emotional expression, in favour of what they saw as the simplicity and "naturalness" of the Italianopera buffa, best represented byGiovanni Battista Pergolesi'sLa serva padrona. Their arguments would exert a great deal of influence over French opera in the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly over the emerging form known asopéra comique.[27]
Opéra comique began life in the early eighteenth century, not in the prestigious opera houses or aristocratic salons, but in the theatres of the annual Paris fairs. Here plays began to include musical numbers calledvaudevilles, which were existing popular tunes refitted with new words. In 1715, the two fair theatres were brought under the aegis of an institution called the Théâtre de l'Opéra-Comique. In spite of fierce opposition from rival theatres, the venture flourished, and composers were gradually brought in to write original music for the plays, which became the French equivalent of the GermanSingspiel, because they contained a mixture of arias and spoken dialogue. TheQuerelle des Bouffons (1752–54), mentioned above, was a major turning-point foropéra comique. In 1752, the leading champion of Italian music, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, produced a short opera,Le Devin du village, in an attempt to introduce his ideals of musical simplicity and naturalness to France. Though Rousseau's piece had no spoken dialogue, it provided an ideal model for composers ofopéra comique to follow. These included the ItalianEgidio Duni (Le peintre amoureux de son modèle, 1757) and the FrenchFrançois-André Danican Philidor (Tom Jones, 1765) andPierre-Alexandre Monsigny (Le déserteur, 1769). All these pieces dealt with ordinarybourgeois characters rather than Classical heroes.
But the most important and popular composer ofopéra comique in the late eighteenth century wasAndré Grétry. Grétry successfully blended Italian tunefulness with a careful setting of the French language. He was a versatile composer who expanded the range ofopéra comique to cover a wide variety of subjects from the Oriental fairy taleZémire et Azor (1772) to the musical satire ofLe jugement de Midas (1778) and the domestic farce ofL'amant jaloux (also 1778). His most famous work was the historical "rescue opera",Richard Coeur-de-lion (1784), which achieved international popularity, reaching London in 1786 andBoston in 1797.[28]
Whileopéra comique flourished in the 1760s, serious French opera was in the doldrums. Rameau had died in 1764, leaving his last greattragédie en musique,Les Boréades unperformed.[29] No French composer seemed capable of assuming his mantle. The answer was to import a leading figure from abroad. The Bohemian-Austrian composerChristoph Willibald Gluck[30] was already famous for his reforms of Italian opera, which had replaced the oldopera seria with a much more dramatic and direct style of music theatre, beginning withOrfeo ed Euridice in 1762. Gluck admired French opera and had absorbed the lessons of both Rameau and Rousseau.[31] In 1765,Melchior Grimm published"Poème lyrique", an influential article for theEncyclopédie onlyric and operalibrettos.[32][33][34][35][36] Under the patronage of his former music pupil,Marie Antoinette, who had married the future French kingLouis XVI in 1770, Gluck signed a contract for six stage works with the management of theParis Opéra. He began withIphigénie en Aulide (19 April 1774). The premiere sparked a huge controversy, almost a war, such as had not been seen in the city since the Querelle des Bouffons. Gluck's opponents brought the leading Italian composer,Niccolò Piccinni, to Paris to demonstrate the superiority ofNeapolitan opera and the "whole town" engaged in an argument between "Gluckists" and "Piccinnists".[37]
On 2 August 1774, the French version ofOrfeo ed Euridice was performed, with the title role transposed from the castrato to the haute-contre, according to the French preference for high tenor voices which had ruled since the days of Lully.[38] This time Gluck's work was better received by the Parisian public. Gluck went on to write a revised French version of hisAlceste, as well as the new worksArmide (1777),Iphigénie en Tauride(1779) andÉcho et Narcisse for Paris. After the failure of the last named opera, Gluck left Paris and retired from composing.[37] But he left behind an immense influence on French music and several other foreign composers followed his example and came to Paris to write Gluckian operas, includingAntonio Salieri (Les Danaïdes, 1784) andAntonio Sacchini (Œdipe à Colone, 1786).[39]
TheFrench Revolution of 1789 was a cultural watershed. What was left of the old tradition of Lully and Rameau was finally swept away, to be rediscovered only in the twentieth century. The Gluckian school andopéra comique survived, but they immediately began to reflect the turbulent events around them. Established composers such as Grétry andNicolas Dalayrac were drafted in to write patriotic propaganda pieces for the new regime.[40] A typical example isFrançois-Joseph Gossec'sLe triomphe de la République (1793) which celebrated the crucialBattle of Valmy the previous year.[41] A new generation of composers appeared, led byÉtienne Méhul and the Italian-bornLuigi Cherubini. They applied Gluck's principles toopéra comique, giving the genre a new dramatic seriousness and musical sophistication. The stormy passions of Méhul's operas of the 1790s, such asStratonice andAriodant, earned their composer the title of the first musicalRomantic.[42] Cherubini's works too held a mirror to the times.Lodoïska was a "rescue opera" set in Poland, in which the imprisoned heroine is freed and her oppressor overthrown. Cherubini's masterpiece,Médée (1797), reflected the bloodshed of the Revolution only too successfully: it was always more popular abroad than in France. The lighterLes deux journées of 1800 was part of a new mood of reconciliation in the country.[43]
Theatres had proliferated during the 1790s, but whenNapoleon took power, he simplified matters by effectively reducing the number of Parisian opera houses to three.[44] These were theOpéra (for serious operas with recitative not dialogue); theOpéra-Comique (for works with spoken dialogue in French); and theThéâtre-Italien (for imported Italian operas). All three would play a leading role over the next half-century or so. At the Opéra,Gaspare Spontini upheld the serious Gluckian tradition withLa vestale (1807) andFernand Cortez (1809). Nevertheless, the lighter newopéra-comiques of Boieldieu andNicolas Isouard were a bigger hit with French audiences, who also flocked to the Théâtre-Italien to see traditionalopera buffa and works in the newly fashionablebel canto style, especially those by Rossini, whose fame was sweeping across Europe. Rossini's influence began to pervade Frenchopéra comique. Its presence is felt in Boieldieu's greatest success,La dame blanche (1825) as well as later works byDaniel Auber (Fra Diavolo, 1830;Le domino noir, 1837),Ferdinand Hérold (Zampa, 1831) andAdolphe Adam (Le postillon de Lonjumeau, 1836).[45] In 1823, the Théâtre-Italien scored an immense coup when it persuaded Rossini himself to come to Paris and take up the post of manager of the opera house. Rossini arrived to welcome worthy of a modern media celebrity. Not only did he revive the flagging fortunes of the Théâtre-Italien, but he also turned his attention to the Opéra, giving it French versions of his Italian operas and a new piece,Guillaume Tell (1829). This proved to be Rossini's final work for the stage. Disillusioned by the failure of this work and ground down the excessive workload of running a theatre, Rossini retired as an opera composer.[46]
Guillaume Tell might initially have been a failure but together with a work from the previous year, Auber'sLa muette de Portici, it ushered in a new genre which dominated the French stage for the rest of the century:grand opera. This was a style of opera characterised by grandiose scale, heroic and historical subjects, large casts, vast orchestras, richly detailed sets, sumptuous costumes, spectacular scenic effects and – this being France – a great deal of ballet music. Grand opera had already been prefigured by works such as Spontini'sLa vestale and Cherubini'sLes Abencérages (1813), but the composer history has above all come to associate with the genre isGiacomo Meyerbeer. Like Gluck, Meyerbeer was a German who had learnt his trade composing Italian opera before arriving in Paris. His first work for the Opéra,Robert le diable (1831), was a sensation; audiences particularly thrilled to the ballet sequence in Act Three in which the ghosts of corrupted nuns rise from their graves. This work, together with Meyerbeer's three subsequent grand operas,Les Huguenots (1836),Le prophète (1849) andL'Africaine (1865), became part of the repertoire throughout Europe for the rest of the nineteenth century and exerted an immense influence on other composers, even though the musical merit of these extravagant works was often disputed. In fact, the most famous example of French grand opera likely to be encountered in opera houses today is byGiuseppe Verdi, who wroteDon Carlos for the Paris Opéra in 1867.[47][48]
While Meyerbeer's popularity has faded, the fortunes of another French composer of the era have risen steeply over the past few decades. Yet the operas ofHector Berlioz were failures in their day. Berlioz was a unique mixture of an innovative modernist and a backward-looking conservative. His taste in opera had been formed in the 1820s, when the works of Gluck and his followers were being pushed aside in favour of Rossinian bel canto. Though Berlioz grudgingly admired some works by Rossini, he despised what he saw as the showy effects of the Italian style and longed to return opera to the dramatic truth of Gluck. He was also a fully-fledgedRomantic, keen to find new ways of musical expression. His first and only work for the Paris Opéra,Benvenuto Cellini (1838), was a notorious failure. Audiences could not understand the opera's originality and musicians found its unconventional rhythms impossible to play.
Twenty years later, Berlioz began writing his operatic masterpieceLes Troyens with himself rather than audiences of the day in mind.[49]Les Troyens was to be the culmination of the French Classical tradition of Gluck and Spontini. Predictably, it failed to make the stage, at least in its complete, four-hour form. For that, it would have to wait until the second half of the twentieth century, fulfilling the composer's prophecy, "If only I could live till I am a hundred and forty, my life would become decidedly interesting".[50] Berlioz's third and final opera, the Shakespearean comedyBéatrice et Bénédict (1862), was written for a theatre in Germany, where audiences were far more appreciative of his musical innovation.
Berlioz was not the only one discontented with operatic life in Paris. In the 1850s, two new theatres attempted to break the monopoly of the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique on the performance of musical drama in the capital. TheThéâtre Lyrique ran from 1851 to 1870. It was here in 1863 that Berlioz saw the only part ofLes Troyens to be performed in his lifetime.
But the Lyrique also staged the premieres of works by a rising new generation of French opera composers, led by Charles Gounod and Georges Bizet. Though not as innovative as Berlioz, these composers were receptive to new musical influences. They also liked writing operas on literary themes. Gounod'sFaust (1859), based on the drama byGoethe, became an enormous worldwide success. Gounod followed it withMireille (1864), based on theProvençal epic byFrédéric Mistral, and the Shakespeare-inspiredRoméo et Juliette (1867). Bizet offered the Théâtre LyriqueLes pêcheurs de perles (1863) andLa jolie fille de Perth, but his biggest triumph was written for the Opéra-Comique.Carmen (1875) is now perhaps the most famous of all French operas. Early critics and audiences, however, were shocked by its unconventional blend of romantic passion and realism.[51]
Another figure unhappy with the Parisian operatic scene in the mid-nineteenth century wasJacques Offenbach. He found that contemporary Frenchopéra-comiques no longer offered any room for comedy. HisThéâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, established in 1855, put on short one-act pieces full of farce and satire. In 1858, Offenbach tried something more ambitious.Orphée aux enfers ("Orpheus in the Underworld") was the first work in a new genre:operetta. It was both a parody of highflown Classical tragedy and a satire on contemporary society. Its incredible popularity prompted Offenbach to follow up with more operettas such asLa belle Hélène (1864) andLa Vie parisienne (1866) as well as the operaLes contes d'Hoffmann (1881).[52]
Opera flourished in late nineteenth-century Paris and many works of the period went on to gain international renown. These includeMignon (1866) andHamlet (1868) byAmbroise Thomas;Samson et Dalila (1877, in theOpéra's new home, thePalais Garnier) byCamille Saint-Saëns;Lakmé (1883) byLéo Delibes; andLe roi d'Ys (1888) byÉdouard Lalo. The most consistently successful composer of the era wasJules Massenet, who produced twenty-five operas in his characteristically suave and elegant style, including several for theThéâtre de la Monnaie inBrussels and theOpéra de Monte-Carlo. His tragic romancesManon (1884) andWerther (1892) have weathered changes in musical fashion and are still widely performed today.[53]
The conservative music critics who had rejected Berlioz detected a new threat in the form ofRichard Wagner, the German composer whose revolutionary music dramas were causing controversy throughout Europe. When Wagner presented a revised version of his operaTannhäuser in Paris in 1861, it provoked so much hostility that the run was cancelled after only three performances. Deteriorating relations between France and Germany only made matters worse and after theFranco-Prussian War of 1870–71, there were political and nationalistic reasons to reject Wagner's influence too. Traditionalist critics used the word "Wagnerian" as a term of abuse for anything that was modern in music. Yet composers such as Gounod and Bizet had already begun to introduce Wagnerian harmonic innovations into their scores, and many forward-thinking artists such as the poetCharles Baudelaire praised Wagner's "music of the future". Some French composers began to adopt the Wagnerian aesthetic wholesale. These includedCésar Franck (Hulda, 1885),Emmanuel Chabrier (Gwendoline, 1886),Vincent d'Indy (Fervaal, 1895) andErnest Chausson (Le roi Arthus, 1903). Few of these works have survived; they were too derivative to preserve much individuality of their own composers.[54]
Claude Debussy had a much more ambivalent – and ultimately more fruitful – attitude to Wagner. Initially overwhelmed by his experience of Wagner's operas, especiallyParsifal, Debussy later tried to break free of his influence. Debussy's only completed operaPelléas et Mélisande (1902) shows the influence of the German composer in the central role given to the orchestra and the complete abolition of the traditional difference between aria and recitative. Indeed, Debussy had complained that there was "too much singing" in conventional opera and replaced it with fluid, vocal declamation moulded to the rhythms of the French language. Debussy made the love story ofPelléas et Mélisande an elusiveSymbolist drama in which the characters only express their feelings indirectly. The mysterious atmosphere of the opera is enhanced by orchestration of remarkable subtlety and suggestive power.[55]
The early years of the twentieth century saw two more French operas which, though not on the level of Debussy's achievement, managed to absorb Wagnerian influences while retaining a sense of individuality. These wereGabriel Fauré's austerely ClassicalPénélope (1913) andPaul Dukas's colourful Symbolist drama,Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1907). The more frivolous genres of operetta and opéra comique still thrived in the hands of composers likeAndré Messager andReynaldo Hahn. Indeed, for many people, light and elegant works like this represented the true French tradition as opposed to the "Teutonic heaviness" of Wagner. This was the opinion ofMaurice Ravel, who wrote only two short but ingenious operas:L'heure espagnole (1911), a farce set in Spain; andL'enfant et les sortilèges (1925), a fantasy set in the world of childhood in which various animals and pieces of furniture come to life and sing.[56]
A younger group of composers, who formed a group known asLes Six shared a similar aesthetic to Ravel. The most important members of Les Six wereDarius Milhaud,Arthur Honegger andFrancis Poulenc. Milhaud was a prolific and versatile composer who wrote in a variety of forms and styles, from theOpéras-minutes (1927–28), none of which is more than ten minutes long, to the epicChristophe Colomb (1928).[57] The Swiss-born Honegger experimented mixing opera withoratorio in works such asLe Roi David (1921) andJeanne d'Arc au bûcher (1938).[58] But the most successful opera composer of the group was Poulenc, though he came late to the genre with the surrealist comedyLes mamelles de Tirésias in 1947. In complete contrast, Poulenc's greatest opera,Dialogues des Carmélites (1957) is an anguished spiritual drama about the fate of a convent during the French Revolution.[59] Poulenc wrote some of the very few operas since theSecond World War to win a wide international audience.
Another post-war composer to attract attention outside France wasOlivier Messiaen, like Poulenc a devoutCatholic. Messiaen's religious dramaSaint François d'Assise (1983) requires huge orchestral and choral forces and lasts four hours.[60] St. François in turn was one of the inspirations forKaija Saariaho'sL'Amour de loin (2000).Denisov'sL'écume des jours (1981) is an adaptation of the novel byBoris Vian.Philippe Boesmans'Julie (2005, afterAugust Strindberg'sMiss Julie) was commissioned by theThéâtre de la Monnaie of Brussels, an important center for French opera even in Lully's day.
Category:French-language operas
