Adolphe Adam, porte-parole de ‟l’école française” de l’opéra-comique. Inventaire et étude synthétique de ses critiques musicales (1833-1856)

Matthieu Cailliez (1)

1 LUHCIE - Laboratoire Universitaire Histoire Cultures Italie Europe

Between 1833 and 1856, the composer Adolphe Adam published more than 360 articles devoted to music in about fifteen Parisian journals and periodicals: "L'Impartial", "La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris", "La France musicale", "Le Constitutionnel", "L'Assemblée nationale", etc. Consequently, this number brings the author of the operas-comiques "Le Chalet" and "Le Postillon de Lonjumeau" and the ballet "Giselle", close to his colleagues and contemporaries Castil-Blaze and Hector Berlioz, authors of, according to the musicologist Séverine Féron, around eight and nine hundred articles (respectively) of musical criticism. Adam’s activity in this area is primarily concentrated in the Second Republic and the Second Empire. The composer thus counts 99 articles published between 1833 and 1847, with an average of six articles per year, against 267 articles published between 1848 and 1856, with an average of twenty-nine articles per year. Our inventory of Adam’s musical criticism has already been the subject of two presentations in November 2015 in Lucca and Bologna. We thus propose to study the role that Adam played in the "French school" of opéra-comique: a genre often described in the nineteenth century as “eminently national." While Boieldieu, Hérold, and Auber only rarely expressed their ideas in the Parisian press, Adam’s articles of musical criticism represent, in our view, an important complement to Berlioz and Castil-Blaze’s articles. They allow us to compare the aesthetics of the principal spokesperson of the "French school" of opéra-comique with that of the great Romantic French composer and that of the important translator of Italian operas.

Mots clés: Opéra de Paris; Castil-Blaze; Hector Berlioz; Théâtre-Italien; Opéra-National; Opéra-Comique; Adolphe Adam; critique musical; L'Impartial; La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris; La France musicale; Le Constitutionnel; L'Assemblée nationale; Théâtre-Lyrique; Conservatoire de Paris; monarchie de Juillet; Seconde République; Second Empire; Le Ménestrel

Domaines: Musique, musicologie et arts de la scène

Matthieu Cailliez. Adolphe Adam, porte-parole de ‟l’école française” de l’opéra-comique. Inventaire et étude synthétique de ses critiques musicales (1833-1856). Journal of Music Criticism, 2019, Perspectives on the French Musical Press in the Long Nineteenth Century, 3, pp.35-108. ⟨hal-02437682⟩