Tra declamazione e pantomima: Metastasio riconcepito

In 1779 a pamphlet appeared entitled Pantomime dramatique that had immediately the honors of laudatory reviews by Diderot and Grimm. The author, who is hiding in anonymity, was Charles-Nicholas Cochin (1715–1790), renowned engraver and painter, philosophe capable of being in relationship both with the circles of encyclopaedists and with their opponents. He was also active in opéra and opéra-comique environments. The booklet was published at the beginning of querelles about Gluck’s operas in Paris and the consequent “fusion of genres” that involved French opera in the second half of the eighteenth-century. The Pantomime dramatique was indeed the first proposal to adjust Metastasian opera seria to the French scene, a dramaturgical idea that many poets and composers will realize in practice few years later; Cochin conceives it as a mixture of music, declamation and pantomime, that involve the principal French debates on a new genre of spectacle.