Music, the Market, and the Marvellous : Parisian Féerie, 1864–1900

Abstract

Music, the Market, and the Marvellous examines féerie, the French fairy play, in the last third of the 19th century. Contrary to received wisdom, the fin de siècle did not mark the decline of féerie. Instead, the period witnessed a renewal of the genre, with two major developments: composerly féerie and scientific féerie, pioneered by Jacques Offenbach and Jules Verne, respectively. The book retraces the transformations of the genre, considering féerie with original music alongside féerie with pre-existing music, supernatural féerie alongside scientific féerie, new féeries alongside revivals of classic féeries, with film féerie looming on the horizon.

Fin-de-siècle féerie is probably one of the purest 19th-century examples of a thoroughly commercial art form, where economic forces (the market) shaped the aesthetic result (the marvellous). This is why the evolution of féerie is inseparable from the evolution of the Parisian theatre industry—with the emergence of a new business model—which in turn is inseparable from the evolution of the urban geography of Paris in the age of Haussmannisation and World’s Fairs.

In addition to recovering a forgotten repertoire, this study provides an invitation to rethink generic taxonomies of Parisian theatre (introducing the concepts of theatre with music, operettisation, and féerisation) and proposes the ‘total artwork of the present’ as a way to account for those products of 19th-century commercial theatre to which Romantic assumptions about authorship and the ontology of the work of art do not apply.