Dr. Gina Rivera
PhD in Musicology, 2013
Harvard University
Location: Humanities 2441
PhD in Musicology, 2013
Harvard University
Location: Humanities 2441
In the system of revival and revision that prevailed in early modern French opera, the soprano Marie Antier saw her significance as Phèdre in Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) diminish at a time when the integrity of lyric tragedy was also cast into doubt. Her plight reflects challenges that the composer and his librettist Pellegrin faced in fashioning a truly tragic work, as well as tensions between the eminence of lyric tragedy and the fact that many commentators viewed it as a genre in decline. The revisions to the role of Phèdre represent a devaluation of tragedy on the part of Rameau and Pellegrin and a nod to the problematic significance of women on stage in these decades, when reconsiderations of opera came face to face with the reception of revolutionary Parisian performers. Antier knew well the popular disdain for women who brought lyric tragedy to life, the so-called filles de l'Opéra considered immoral and pilloried by the likes of Pellegrin for working into old age. Antier confronted Rameau's revisions just as her own star was setting: active until the age of fifty-four, she performed for a longer period of time than many of her colleagues, who customarily retired in their thirties. As the woman tasked with premiering one of the great tragic Rameau roles, she was a tragédienne in her twilight, a fraught Phèdre whose advancing age and reception in real life also shed light on a lyric genre on the wane.
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