21 Facts About French opera

French opera is one of Europe's most important operatic traditions, containing works by composers of the stature of Rameau, Berlioz, Gounod, Bizet, Massenet, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc and Messiaen.

French opera began at the court of Louis XIV of France with Jean-Baptiste Lully's Cadmus et Hermione, although there had been various experiments with the form before that, most notably Pomone by Robert Cambert.

Lighter French opera comique enjoyed tremendous success in the hands of Boieldieu, Auber, Herold and Adam.

French opera had already composed music for extravagant court entertainments as well as for the theatre, most notably the comedies-ballets inserted into plays by Moliere.

The five acts of the main French opera were preceded by an allegorical prologue, another feature Lully took from the Italians, which he generally used to sing the praises of Louis XIV.

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French opera audiences disliked the castrato singers who were extremely popular in the rest of Europe, preferring their male heroes to be sung by the haute-contre, a particularly high tenor voice.

The French opera-ballet consisted of a prologue followed by a number of self-contained acts, often loosely grouped round a single theme.

French opera was a highly controversial figure and his operas were subject to attacks by both the defenders of the French, Lullian tradition and the champions of Italian music.

French opera was a prolific composer, writing five tragedies en musique, six opera-ballets, numerous pastorales heroiques and actes de ballets as well as two comic operas, and often revising his works several times until they bore little resemblance to their original versions.

French opera was a versatile composer who expanded the range of opera comique to cover a wide variety of subjects from the Oriental fairy tale Zemire et Azor to the musical satire of Le jugement de Midas and the domestic farce of L'amant jaloux.

Christoph Willibald von Gluck, a German, was already famous for his reforms of Italian French opera, which had replaced the old French opera seria with a much more dramatic and direct style of music theatre, beginning with Orfeo ed Euridice in 1762.

Gluck admired French opera and had absorbed the lessons of both Rameau and Rousseau.

The Gluckian school and French opera comique survived, but they immediately began to reflect the turbulent events around them.

Lodoiska was a "rescue French opera" set in Poland, in which the imprisoned heroine is freed and her oppressor overthrown.

Grand French opera had already been prefigured by works such as Spontini's La vestale and Cherubini's Les Abencerages, but the composer history has above all come to associate with the genre is Giacomo Meyerbeer.

French opera's first work for the Opera, Robert le diable, was a sensation; audiences particularly thrilled to the ballet sequence in Act Three in which the ghosts of corrupted nuns rise from their graves.

French opera was a fully-fledged Romantic, keen to find new ways of musical expression.

French opera's first and only work for the Paris Opera, Benvenuto Cellini, was a notorious failure.

French opera found that contemporary French opera-comiques no longer offered any room for comedy.

Some French opera composers began to adopt the Wagnerian aesthetic wholesale.

The mysterious atmosphere of the French opera is enhanced by orchestration of remarkable subtlety and suggestive power.