Popular Opera in Eighteenth-Century France

David Charlton is Emeritus Professor of Music History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published on topics in opera between Bizet and Purcell. He is author of Grétry and the Growth of Opera-Comique (Cambridge University Press, 1986) and Opera in the Age of Rousseau (Cambridge University Press, 2012), editor of The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and also of The Music of Simon Holt (The Boydell Press, 2017).

• 1. Introduction; 2. Music and spoken theatre; 3. Music in Gherardi's company; 4. Singing and acting at home; 5. Opéra-comique en vaudevilles; 6. Experiences of popular theatre; 7. Comic and serious themes; 8. Performance as history; 9. Musical expansion; 10. Italian inroads: the King's company; 11. Six methods of synthesis; 12. A 'Musico-dramatic art'; 13. Conclusions.

'Ultimately, Popular Opera is a towering intellectual achievement that stands to significantly reorient contemporary accounts of eighteenth-century French opera. Charlton paves the way for a history of this repertoire in which previously discounted genres like fairground comedy and operatic parody take their place alongside the tragédie en musique. In this monograph, popular opera truly receives the limelight it has long deserved.' Callum Blackmore, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies