UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the brief flowering of French opera on stages outside of France around the turn of the eighteenth century. I attribute the sudden rise and fall of interest in the genre to a large and noisy migration event--the flight of some 200,000 Huguenots from France. Dispersed across Western Europe and beyond, Huguenots maintained extensive networks that encouraged the exchange of ideas and of music. And it was precisely in the great centers of the Second Refuge that French opera was performed.

Following the wide-ranging career path of Huguenot impresario, novelist, poet, and spy Jean-Jacques Quesnot de la Chenée, I construct an alternative history of French opera by tracing its circulation and transformation along Huguenot migration routes. This history attributes the lack of a sustained tradition beyond la France not to the genre's musical or dramatic forms or its allegiance to French politics, but rather to the changing social and religious pressures on its primary foreign audience.

My primary argument is that only after they left France did the Huguenots--and French opera--become identifiably "French," for one of the most significant effects of this migration event was the contesting and reconfiguration of the nature of Frenchness itself. Once abroad, the Huguenots were viewed by their hosts first and foremost as French. Similarly, the appearance of French opera outside of its place of origin contributed to distinctions between various "national" styles of composition precisely because of its placement in comparison with other forms of spectacular entertainment.

Engaging questions of translation, performance, mobility, and reception, I show that the nostalgia for French cultural products experienced by these displaced persons, as well as the received opinion amongst host societies that French spectacle was of a higher order, created opportunities for entrepreneurs and contributed to the canonization of Lully and the codification of the French style. And French opera, because of its associations with Paris and its focus on spectacle and group expression, became an important instrument in discourses of identity and cultural competence abroad. However, the shifting status of French immigrants during this period limited the usefulness--and indeed the feasibility--of actual productions. In sum, I argue that the opera was itself a site of refuge that could exist only as long as the French community abroad remained culturally distinct.