WRITING IN THE MID-EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, Louis de Cahusac observed that Philippe Quinault had made “just one mistake, suggested to him by false modesty,” when he devised the genre of tragédie en musique in the 1670s: he misnamed it. Had Quinault put “opera” rather than “tragedy” at the head of his livrets, Boileau would have judged the form on its own terms, and, no longer forced to see “tragedies other than his occupy Paris,” Racine “would have had no difficulty applauding Armide, Opera.”  In Cahusac’s view, Quinault took parts from ancient tragedy, Italian opera, and the regular declaimed tragedy of Pierre Corneille “in order to construct a new genre which, without resembling these, could bring together all their beauties” in a “French spectacle of song and dance.”  Whereas Corneille had drawn his subjects from history, obeying the unities of action, place, and time and relying solely on verse and stage action to “sustain the illusion, the emotion, and the dramatic interest” of his plots, Quinault avoided history, choosing instead “the marvelous” as the “foundation stone of his edifice.”  “The most complex dance, the miracles of scene painting, the marvels of machinery, harmony, perspective, optical illusion” —all these were a bearable and even necessary part of a theater of enchantment.

Accounts like Cahusac’s persuaded some critics to maintain that tragédie en musique developed as a distinct genre that the French considered modern yet defensible in terms of Aristotle’s Poetics. According to this line of interpretation, declaimed tragedy and tragédie en musique were mutually constitutive inversions of each other. Both genres were expected to respect the laws of necessity, propriety, and verisimilitude, but the very meaning of those laws changed when the field of action shifted from history to the enchanted world of the opera house.

Yet the two genres were hardly amicable neighbors. By the time Cahusac was writing in 1754, French declaimed tragedy and tragédie en musique had already fought several skirmishes over the legacy of Euripides. While it was natural that tragedians would lay claim to the poet whom Aristotle had anointed “the most tragic” (Poetics 1453a22-39), the fact that Euripides relied so heavily on sung monodies to depict the love and madness of his heroines and often concluded his tragedies with the marvelous entrance of deities in machines also recommended him to librettists like Quinault, whose Alceste sparked a ferocious quarrel in 1674 when Charles Perrault declared it superior to the original. Racine came to the defense of his beloved Euripides, claiming to be his legitimate heir, and allies lined up to support either ancients or moderns, declaimed tragedy or tragédie en musique.

The quarrel over Alceste by no means settled the matter once and for all. Knowing full well that his views would “displease the inventors of tragédies en musique, poems as ridiculous as new,” André Dacier, the perpetual secretary of the Académie Française, insisted in his 1692 commentary on the Poetics that, although a cursory examination of Aristotle might suggest that music was essential to tragedy, its part in Greek tragedy was in fact a cultural accident: “I must confess, I could never well understand how music came to be considered as making in any respect a part of tragedy; for if there be any thing in the world that appears stranger, and more contrary than another, to tragic action, it is song.”  Dacier concluded that music and dance had survived in Greek tragedy only as artifacts of the superstitious ceremonies from which tragedy had originated—furnishing the intermissions (intermèdes), but not adorning the tragic action itself. As if it were not enough to have the secretary of the Académie dismissing the very premise that had justified the birth of opera—that Greek tragedy had been sung—Boileau attacked the genre on quite different grounds the very next year, censuring in his tenth satire both Quinault and Lully for depicting the loves of Renaud and Roland so seductively that even a virgin from Port-Royal who happened into the opera house might be expected to model her conduct on that of the libidinous Angelique or Armide.

Perhaps these attacks goaded the Académie de Musique into mounting a renewed challenge to the domain of declaimed tragedy during the season of 1693, for in no other opera season during the epoch from Lully to Rameau do we find such a concerted attempt to re-imagine the masterpieces of ancient tragedy and to revise some of the foundational works of French classical theater. Jean-Galbert de Campistron and composers Louis Lully and Marin Marais opened with Alcide, a revision of Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis, Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus, and Jean Rotrou’s Hercule mourant (1636). Madame Gillot de Sainctonge (the Académie’s first female librettist) and composer Henry Desmarets followed with Didon. And Thomas Corneille and Marc-Antoine Charpentier ended the season with Médée, the subject with which Thomas’s elder brother Pierre had commenced his career as a tragedian in 1635. All three tragédies en musique dwell on the destructive power of love; they show a fresh interest in presenting the heroic personality in grievous emotional and physical pain; and they betray dissatisfaction with Quinault’s and Lully’s usual practice of concluding their works with divertissements. Instead, they prefer uncompromising final tableaux: Hercules in agony, falling on his pyre; Dido in despair, plunging Aeneas’s sword into her heart; Médée in triumph, reviewing the destruction she has wrought from her aerial vantage point.