Legal Discourses in Opéra-comique, 1762-1814

The relationship between opéra-comique and the contemporary legal system is a fascinating subject because of the entanglement and interactivity between them. The spread and development of the genre were influenced significantly by the changes in the legal environment, while it actively reflected legal questions. The proposed study aims to fill in the gap in the research about the legal landscape related to opéra-comique by dynamically examining the transformation in the legal system relevant to the genre between 1780 and 1814 in Paris. However, this project will not only investigate the legal landscape of the genre but also decipher the legal discourses implied by works and then demonstrate how spectators thought about the legal questions depicted by those works. This research primarily relies on library, archive, and text-based sources, using the traditional methodology of Historical Musicology to interpret texts and explore historical evidence. Besides, the project is also based on a perspective of comparative history and interdisciplinary methods. The results obtained through my proposed research ought to be able to shed light upon the reasons why opéra-comique was passionately interested in political expressions, offer additional evidence and explanations for the ambiguous and shifting relation of theatrical works and explicit political content and elucidate an operatic form’s practical contributions to a turbulent society in a period when theatres, according to almost all recent critics, have enormous importance.