The ancient world on the operatic stage
What with the decline of Romanticism, the success of a bourgeois art and the survival of interest in ancient culture, might we not be seeing here a creeping transfer of creative inspiration towards a make-believe imaginative world presented with ambiguous realism, frequently chaste and immodest at one and the same time? This form of sensibility generally obtained official recognition. Napoleon III purchased Cabanel’s Birth of Venus as soon as it was exhibited at the 1863 Salon, while legend has it that, at the ‘Salon des Refusés’ inaugurated that same year, his wife, the Empress Eugénie, struck with her fan Édouard Manet’s painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which was deemed scandalous and roused the bourgeois to mocking laughter.
Antiquity remained a theme for opera, but in what tone should it be treated? The diversity of Paris’s operatic venues allows us to appreciate the complexity of the responses.
CD-Book Ambroise Thomas. Psyché (2025). Translation: Charles Johnston.
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publication date : 31/10/25