A playlist is personal.
A musical cosmos created at my own request.
Tell me what you hear and I will tell you who you are.
Music, organized according to personal needs, was still unknown in Paris when thousands of people poured out of their homes in 1813.
They stand along the streets like an avenue of bodies.
Your gaze follows the funeral procession through the city.
André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry (1741 to 1813) lies in the coffin.
The crowd loves its friendly melodies and dramatic operas.
His funeral, along with Napoleon's and Victor Hugo's, was the largest in nineteenth-century France.
But who was Grétry?
His work spans the epoch of France determined by upheavals and political changes, from the Ancien Régime, through the revolution and the great terror, to the rise and fall of Napoleon's Grand Empire.
Born out of the reprisals of the respective historical phase and the resulting possibilities, he, together with Méhul, Spontini, Cherubini, Lesueur, Gossec, Jadin, Onslow inevitably shaped an epoch of musical diversity and connections.
The composers adapt their music to changing political conditions.
With “Héroïque ou tyrannique?
La musique à l'époque de Napoléon Bonaparte ”, the Palazzetto Bru Zane Foundation is currently organizing a multinational festival in Venice with the aim of showing the musical wealth of this era.
The metropolis of progress
Italian composers have been crossing the Alps to spread their music since the seventeenth century. While people in England, Spain, the Netherlands and also the German-speaking countries are more open to newer influences, in France they are more dismissive due to their own musical tradition around Lully and Rameau as well as absolutism. That changes with the revolution. The mood of upheaval makes Paris a metropolis of progress and culture. It was in this intellectual climate that Gluck's opera reform also emerged, which neither gave the music nor the text a boost, but was solely committed to drama.
Until then, the plot of an opera was primarily a pretext for all sorts of pomp and propaganda. After all, one perceives the subjects of ancient heroes as too artificial and at the same time connects them with the traditional absolutism of the ancien régime. A series of “Querelles” deals with the questions of whether antiquity can be a role model for the present or what heroic nobility has to do with the endless drudgery of working life. So at that time music is ideally charged in all directions, and one is looking for a way to a new naturalness.
After Gluck's resounding success, the composers orbit his musical heritage like planets orbits the sun, while Napoleon steers their orbits. He decides whether an opera will be performed or not. Every libretto and every performance is checked. At the same time, it subsidizes the large venues, the grands théâtres, in order to circumvent uncontrollable private financiers. Under Napoleon's rule, opera is once again based on political ideals and ancient didactic pieces. There they are again, the heroes, far from everyday life, and the composers write new songs for them. But the desire for everyday and strange fabrics is so great that the various offers are divided into eight large playhouses. Ballet music, comedies and tragic dramas are played in the theaters,to cover everything from the cheerful character to the intellectual reverberation that the audience demands. The promotion of opera and the establishment of a conservatory basically pursues a goal similar to bread and games in ancient Rome: to secure the people's favor with their ruler.