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