Opéra de Salon: Parisian Societies and Spaces, 1850-1870

Summary: As we begin to dissociate music in the theatre from opera houses or even from ‘opera’ itself, unknown repertories emerge from the shadows. The c130 so-called opéras de salon, composed in Paris during the 1850s and 1860s were performed in over 60 different locations across the city. This interactive map shows all these locations, the hosts of the performances, the performers and the works performed.

Research Process: Performances were gathered from a systematic analysis of the Parisian music press (Le ménestrel, La France musicale, La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris): a search of just over 4,000 pages). Sometimes very sketchy details were then run through the annual volumes of the Almanach-Bottin du commerce de Paris, des départemens de la France et des principales villes du monde to yield the specific addresses for each of the salons, studios and concert halls that gave a home to opéra de salon. Of the c200 performances documented in the map, around 150 were successfully attributed to individual locations.

Opéra de salon: Opéra de salon consisted of works in one act with an overture and an average of seven composed numbers; the kinetic action in the work, as in opéra comique and in opérette (which emerged at the same time as opéra de salon) is presented in spoken dialogue. The genre was promoted by salonniers/salonnières through Paris during the Second Empire (1852-1870), but was also found in concert halls and. performers’ and composers’ studios. The map clearly shows how clearly geolocated were performances given by musicians (in Nouvelle -Athènes), by non-musicians (in the Eastern Faubourg Saint-Germain for the moyen bourgeois and in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré for the haut bourgeois), and in concert halls.

Opera outside the opera house: The project forms part of a broader tendency to recognise that music destined for the theatre rarely stayed there. Performances of individual arias from musical works for the stage had been a part of salon culture for decades, alongside performances of works for solo piano, romances and chamber music, but opéra de salon constitutes the first genre to propose a genre specifically written for the salon.

Opportunities and limitations: The opportunities for mapping the diffusion of a completely unknown genre are clear, and the possibility of offering such high levels of precision and accuracy is also well-defined. Salons, studios and concert halls are almost all identified and mapped. The limitation of the project lies in the c50 opéras de salon that were published in journals aimed at young women (Journal des demoiselles; Magasin des demoiselles) and that were destined for performance in the lower moyen-bourgeois or even petit-bourgeois parloir. These more modest performances never reached the press, and therefore left no trace analogous to that left by the performances mapped here.

Mapping Process and Details: All the research data was assembled in a structured form, addresses were identified by latitude and longitude and plotted on a map form the period. The map chosen was Nouveau plan complet de Paris avec ses fortifications (Paris: Bes et Dubreuil, 1855) hosted by the Harvard Geospatial Library (https://hgl.harvard.edu/catalog/harvard-g5834-p3-1855-h4). For clarity, the individual types of venue were identfied as ‘music performance’; ‘non-music performance’ (indiciating the professional or social interests of the hosts); and ‘concert hall’.

The Research Team: The data were assembled by Mark Everist, and the mapping undertaken by Maeve Nagel-Frazel, under the supervision of Louis Epstein, the director of the musicalgeography.org project.

Bibliography: The mapping project supports work on Mark Everist, Opéra de Salon: Parisian Societies and Spaces, 1850-1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), where the very slender existing bibliography on the subject is discussed, and is complemented by a website that gives

further detail on all works in the repertory (Music in the Second Empire Theatre (MitSET), 2019- http://www.fmc.ac.uk/mitset/index.html?#/).