UW-Madison Faculty
Charles Dill (profile)
Professor of Musicology
Location: Humanities 1641
In 1879, Adolphe Jullien published an essay entitled “L’Eglise et l’Opéra en 1735. Mlle. Lemaure et l’Evêque de Saint-Papoul.” Jullien’s interest in the singer Catherine-Nicole Lemaure and the bishop of Saint-Papoul Jean-Charles de Segur, was largely anecdotal, laying out an instance in which public interest focused on the behavior of an opera singer. The 1730s were a period in which the Parisian public took particular interest in opera and its singers, in which five of Rameau’s major works premiered, and discussion of the social importance of opera was nearly constant, reaching from reflections in aesthetics treatises to the pages of official journals and on to street songs sung on Pont Neuf. In this context, the so-called filles de l’Opéra, and Lemaure in particular, received more than their share of attention.
My own interest is drawn to the odd pairing, in Jullien’s story, of the Opéra with ongoing controversies surrounding the acceptance of the anti-Jansenist papal bull, Unigenitus, represented by Segur's resignation. In the past two decades, since first reading Jullien’s essay, I have found numerous iterations of this pairing, which extends from the Janesenist condemnations of theatrical entertainment in the 1670s to pamphlets associated with the querelle des bouffons in the 1750s. More than an isolated matter arising in 1735, then, the pairing of an austere form of Catholicism with one of the principal forms of entertainment was a theme that drew public interest for about seventy years. It was a comparison, a joke perhaps, an expression of some kind that we no longer understand. What I hope to do in the present study is examine two documents from Jullien’s story to reveal a bit what this pairing implied and to understand better contemporary social anxieties over opera. It is my contention that the documents tell us something about how the public viewed opera.
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