Opera in the Bathroom

The nineteenth-century French state controlled its theatres, opera houses and their underpinning creative forces through various technologies of power. Through a series of licences, cahiers de charges and other legislative instruments, changing regimes could manage the politics of genre while institutions, managers, composers and librettists could attempt to manipulate those technologies of power to their own ends in a way that confirms that view that there is some sort of exploitable power everywhere in a given culture. In the Second Empire, the Opéra was taken over by a cabal of highly-placed politicians, while the legal restrictions for the rest of French theatrical and operatic culture slowly began to unravel up to the point at which the legislation was repealed in 1864. Much less well known is the power exercised within the culture of opéra de salon which took off around 1850. One-act opéra comique and opérette, usually characterised by a restricted number of movements and the use of spoken dialogue, became available as a generic tool for the display of individual power and personality for such wealthy and aristocratic Parisians as members of the imperial family, bankers, and other industrialists during the Second Empire that matched the power over the politics of genre exercised by the state. Music and theatre became an asset that could be displayed in one’s own home, and could sit alongside such other trappings of domestic power as physical opulence, collections of art, dress and deportment. Because of the portable and provisional generic characteristics of opéra de salon, the genre opened up the possibility to private individuals of installing temporary theatres in their salons (many of considerable size) or to hire public spaces — concert halls, architects’ studios or the recently-opened Néothermes — to display their financial and — vicariously — artistic power through the means of this newly-emergent genre.