Féerie and the Sound of Nineteenth-Century Parisian Commercial Theatre

Féerie and the Sound of Nineteenth-Century Parisian Commercial Theatre

What do Jacques Offenbach, Jules Verne, and Georges Méliès have in common? The answer is féerie, the French fairy play, a once ubiquitous genre analogous in some respects to the English Christmas pantomime. Long neglected by scholars, féerie — and fin-de-siècle féerie in particular — poses significant challenges to music historiography. How to deal with a genre that might or might not have original music, that might look like melodrama or operetta, whose subject matter can be supernatural as well as scientific, whose dialogue and music can change drastically with each production? How to account for an art form that is unabashedly commercial, shaped by the forces of the Parisian theatre industry, and defies Romantic ideas of the creative genius and the work of art?

Tommaso Sabbatini is a music historian specializing in nineteenth-century French theatre. He is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bristol and McGill University; his research has been supported by the French Government, the American Musicological Society, and the British Academy. He is the author Music, the Market, and the Marvellous: Parisian Féerie, 1864–1900 (Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2024) and is preparing an edition of the Opéra-Comique production book from the French première of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca. His current research project reexamines the fin-de-siècle repertoires claimed as part of the French operetta tradition and the invention of such tradition.

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