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The Confusion of Diverse Voices: Musical and Social Polyphony in Seventeenth-Century French Opera

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2020

Ellen R. Welch
Ellen R. Welch*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Abstract

This essay explores how two early modern French writers considered choral music in opera as a figure for society. Pierre Corneille, in his musical tragedy “Andromède,” and scientist and critic Claude Perrault, in several texts about music and acoustics, made subtle apologies for the polyphonic choral song condemned by many contemporaries as unintelligible. Beyond defending the aesthetic value of choral music, Corneille and Perrault associated multi-part song with collective vocalizations offstage, in the real world. Their instructions on how to appreciate choral interludes in opera also served, therefore, to train listeners to attend to the polyphony of society.

Type
Articles
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 73 , Issue 2 , Summer 2020 , pp. 567 - 594
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by the Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

Earlier versions of this essay were presented to the University of Virginia French Department and the Early Modern French Salon at Columbia University. I thank the insightful and attentive audiences at those events as well as Renaissance Quarterly's anonymous readers for their helpful feedback.

References

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