"Une Vaine Pompe Sans but"? Operatic Spectacle Under Scrutiny in Napoleon's Paris

After its 1807 premiere, the Journal de l’Empire concluded that Le Triomphe de Trajan escaped being “a vain pomp without cause” only because its Roman hero Trajan was a clear allegory of France’s own victorious emperor, Napoleon, thereby turning the premiere into a national celebration. Politics and spectacle; from the mid-nineteenth century until today, the prominence of these elements in the repertoire of the Paris Opéra under the Empire (1804-14) has led to the dismissal of these operas as mere propaganda unworthy of critical attention.

 In contrast, I argue that early-nineteenth-century discourse on this repertoire illuminates later debates about the nature and function of spectacle in French Grand Opéra and operatic media theories such as Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. In 1807, the press pitted the visually astounding Trajan against the passionate music of La Vestale demonstrating how their fundamentally different exploitation of media elicited aesthetic questions such as which art (poetry, music or staging) has the greatest impact on the audience? Do spectacular effects need to be dramatically integrated into the narrative? Moreover, political, artistic and commercial concerns arose about how the Opéra’s reliance on spectacle affected its reputation in Paris’s cultural landscape with the emperor wanting to restore the house to its rightful place as Europe’s first theater and the popular boulevard theaters competing with the operatic stages for the audience’s attention through technologically experimental extravaganzas. The focus on this repertoire thus also offers new insights into the origins of the art world’s ambivalent stance towards technological innovation and commercial profitability.