Grand opera was the dominant form of theater in nineteenth-century Paris, and it is a term that is frequently used to refer to productions at the Paris Opera House. These somber, often tragic history plays were lavishly staged, with a ballet, a live orchestra, and a large cast of internationally renowned singers. The stage designs, costumes, and sets were always spectacular, equating these productions to today’s Hollywood blockbuster films. Although this musical genre is most closely associated with French composers, it also includes seminal works by Italian and German artists who were drawn to Paris’s creative culture at the time.
Grand operas were frequently based on historical events; Auber’s La Muette de Portici (1828) was one of the first popular revolutionary epics, and it even depicted a live eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Others were written to depict current events, such as Napoleon’s conquest battles during the Revolutionary War and his reign as Emperor. Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le diable was the first new work to premiere at the Paris Opera House after the French revolution, after the government had privatized the state-run opera. Les Huguenots, the most successful of all 19th century grand operas, followed this political, liberal melodrama in 1836. The Paris Opera staged many grand operas that are now considered classics during the 1840s and 1850s; Donizetti’s Dom Sébastien (1843), Giuseppe Verdi’s Jérusalem and Les vêpres siciliennes (1855), and Charles Gounod’s Faust (1859) all define the genre during the golden age of grand opera.
The inclusion of a ballet, usually at the start of Act II, was an important part of the grand opera tradition. While the ballet interludes were not always related to the plot of the play, the aristocratic patrons of the Paris Opera appreciated the opportunity to dine and socialize between acts. Composers who deviated from this formula, such as Richard Wagner, may be scorned by an audience more interested in supper conversation than the drama unfolding onstage. The Paris Opera House withdrew Wagner’s Tannhäuser after only three performances when he attempted to stage it as a Grand Opera in 1861. A large number of wealthy patrons had complained that the ballet in Act I had disrupted their pleasant meal.
In the 1860s, the Paris Grand Opera revised and revived Faust, with even larger staging and sets than before. Other popular productions at the time included Charles Gounod’s La reine de Saba, Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlos (1867), and Ambroise Thomas’ Hamlet (1968). Grand opera, on the other hand, began to fade in the 1870s as new musical trends emerged and composers like Wagner rose to prominence. Classic grand opera’s massive stage spectacles were prohibitively expensive to produce and no longer drew the types of large audiences required to justify the cost of production.